tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7079343630025538378Wed, 30 Nov 2016 06:45:59 +0000conceptssolutionsHealthGeneticsInfrastructureSciTechagriculture3DPrintingITalternative economyInternetGlobalistsdiyBioorganicbusinessGMOaquaculturehackerSpacesLocalWelfareThailandbiotechDronesJapanMakerspacesOpenSourcebigAgriboycotteducationtelecomAICubaDARPADangersEnergyEntertainmentHavanaIPMITOCWOSartificialIntelligenceclimate changecolor revolutionscommunicationscommunityGardenscorbett reporteconomicsgloblaistsmachineLearningpermaculturepost scarcitypropagandasingularityLocalOrghttp://localorg.blogspot.com/noreply@blogger.com (Land Destroyer)Blogger133125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7079343630025538378.post-3302524954797303084Wed, 30 Nov 2016 06:45:00 +00002016-11-29T22:45:59.455-08:00AIITmachineLearningSciTechThe Imperative to Democratize Artificial Intelligence <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><b>November 30, 2016</b> (LocalOrg) - MIT Technology Review recently published an article titled, "<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602958/an-ai-ophthalmologist-shows-how-machine-learning-may-transform-medicine/?utm_campaign=socialflow&amp;utm_source=twitter&amp;utm_medium=post">An AI Ophthalmologist Shows How Machine Learning May Transform Medicine</a>." In it, it describes how Google researchers at their DeepMind subsidiary used artificial intelligence (AI) to scan images of human eyes to detect a common form of blindness as well as, or better than trained experts can.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-IN4RIElT87o/WD5zXHpxlJI/AAAAAAAAO4Y/uZb48Z_uyVsNgE1ujrFgVGzaz-phM2H0ACLcB/s1600/deepmind-head.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="352" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-IN4RIElT87o/WD5zXHpxlJI/AAAAAAAAO4Y/uZb48Z_uyVsNgE1ujrFgVGzaz-phM2H0ACLcB/s640/deepmind-head.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br />They achieved this by using the same machine learning techniques Google and other tech giants including Facebook use to analyze images that show up on their web platforms. Instead of creating complex programs to handle every conceivable detail in an image, researchers instead teach machines how to learn on their own when exposed to large volumes of pre-tagged examples.<br /><br />In the MIT Technology Review article, DeepMind's algorithm studied some 128,000 retinal images that were already classified by ophthalmologists.<br /><br />The breakthrough is only the latest in a long line of advances in AI. AI machine learning is already being widely used in real-world applications, including sifting through the United Kingdom's National Health Service's records, automatically tagging - and flagging - images, videos, and voice across vast social networks, improving efficiency at utility plants by spotting trends and automatically adjusting power consumption, inputs, and outputs, as well as developing protocols for both pharmaceutical production and genetic engineering.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nDPAT2l3M9Y/WD5zEtVMWPI/AAAAAAAAO4U/shj-gPt1uH4OAcnRqtw_H0Mo_1iOVhW7QCLcB/s1600/block_diagram-e1444082440229.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="532" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nDPAT2l3M9Y/WD5zEtVMWPI/AAAAAAAAO4U/shj-gPt1uH4OAcnRqtw_H0Mo_1iOVhW7QCLcB/s640/block_diagram-e1444082440229.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /><br />DeepMind's research into analyzing medical imagery is already set to be integrated into its UK NHS collaboration, according to the Guardian in an article titled, "<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/05/google-deepmind-nhs-machine-learning-blindness">Google DeepMind pairs with NHS to use machine learning to fight blindness</a>," which reports:<br /><blockquote><i>Google DeepMind has announced its second collaboration with the NHS, working with Moorfields Eye Hospital in east London to build a machine learning system which will eventually be able to recognise sight-threatening conditions from just a digital scan of the eye.&nbsp;</i><i><br /></i><i><br /></i><i>The collaboration is the second between the NHS and DeepMind, which is the artificial intelligence research arm of Google, but Deepmind’s co-founder, Mustafa Suleyman, says this is the first time the company is embarking purely on medical research. An earlier, ongoing, collaboration, with the Royal Free hospital in north London, is focused on direct patient care, using a smartphone app called Streams to monitor kidney function of patients.</i></blockquote>In essence, those who control AI technology have access to algorithms that can perform specific tasks better than any trained human can. This confers on those who control this technology an immense advantage and creates disparity those without AI technology have no means of competing against.<br /><br /><br /><a name='more'></a>Corporations and nations wielding this power, as the number of applications expands, represent an alarming, emerging disparity that may lead to the same sort of abuses and exploitation other forms of technological disparity throughout history have wrought.<br /><br /><b>Democratizing AI&nbsp;</b><br /><br />Effort into developing AI applications involves big-data. Training machines rather than merely programming them, means exposing them to large amounts of information they can sift through and train themselves with. In order to do this, not only do large amounts of information need to be collected, they need to be tagged or otherwise classified so machines have a baseline to improve against.<br /><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-yapWVXmod6U/WD5zqdhidUI/AAAAAAAAO4c/zlM7XYMMiBYfkJPfp7tQY1gk-XEezrraACLcB/s1600/deep_learning_developer_box_h425px.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-yapWVXmod6U/WD5zqdhidUI/AAAAAAAAO4c/zlM7XYMMiBYfkJPfp7tQY1gk-XEezrraACLcB/s400/deep_learning_developer_box_h425px.png" width="393" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><b>Image:</b> A deep learning developer box, <a href="https://www.cadnetwork.de/de/solutions/deep-learning">via CADnetwork</a>.</i></td></tr></tbody></table>The development of these large data sets, as well as developing algorithms to exploit them, requires (at the moment) large numbers of participants outside of corporations like Google and their subsidiaries like DeepMind.<br /><br />Toward that end, opensource software libraries for machine learning, like <a href="https://www.tensorflow.org/">Google's TensorFlow</a> are available online for free. GitHub, an online development repository, <a href="https://github.com/showcases/machine-learning">offers access to a wide range of other available machine learning libraries</a> coders and programmers can use.<br /><br />The physical hardware currently being used to build deep learning machines include GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) similar to those found in high-end gaming computers. <a href="http://graphific.github.io/posts/building-a-deep-learning-dream-machine/">Instructions are online</a> on how to build deep learning machines, including information provided <a href="https://developer.nvidia.com/devbox">by companies like NVIDIA</a> which make commercially available GPUs. <br /><br />While it remains to be seen what individual or independent groups of developers can achieve in terms of democratizing this technology, it may be in the best interests of nation-states to begin developing their own AI programs rather than wait for Google, Facebook, and even China's Baidu to "share" this technology with them.<br /><br />It may also be in their best interests to examine the merits of promoting the democratization of this technology. Where a lack of resources to acquire high-level researchers at an institutional level exists, democratizing and thus tapping a larger pool of talent to even the odds in the AI race while also raising public literacy regarding this increasingly pivotal technology may be an alternative option.<br /><br />Research into AI cannot be "banned" and breakthroughs cannot be "un-invented." With the tools already widely (and in some cases, freely) available to advance AI, attempts to put this civilization-changing technology "back in the box" will only waste time and resources. The only way to counter the harmful application of AI is by possessing an equal or greater capacity to utilize the technology and increase the number of people both educated in how it works, and capable of applying it in reaction to harmful exploitation of it. <br /><br />Just like information technology, nuclear weapons, or even firearms tilted the global balance of power in favor of those who initially wielded them before more acquired and exploited these technologies, AI too poses a threat unless and until it is more widely adopted and democratized.<br /><br />With the power to focus on and master any task at superhuman levels, we ignore the challenge to balance this emerging power at our own peril.<br /><br /><i style="background-color: white; font-family: &quot;trebuchet ms&quot;, trebuchet, verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 15.4px;"><b style="font-size: 15.4px;"><span style="color: #0b5394;"><a href="http://localorg.blogspot.com/" style="color: #1155cc; text-decoration: none;">LocalOrg</a></span></b><span style="font-size: 15.4px;">&nbsp;seeks to explore local solutions to global problems by empowering people locally with education and technology to not only survive, but to thrive.</span></i><br />&nbsp;<br /></div>http://localorg.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-imperative-to-democratize.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Land Destroyer)tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7079343630025538378.post-7907744532991332080Sun, 27 Nov 2016 16:57:00 +00002016-11-27T08:57:45.940-08:00agricultureaquacultureAquaponics Expert JD Sawyer Talks About Healthy Food Self Sufficiency<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><b>November 27, 2016</b> (<a href="http://www.activistpost.com/2016/11/can-achieve-healthy-food-self-sufficiency-aquaponics.html">Activist Post</a>) - In this segment of The Vin Armani Show, our interview guest is JD Sawyer of Colorado Aquaponics and The Aquaponic Source. Aquaponics is one of the most powerful technologies for individual liberty, security, and health. We find out why.Visit The Aquaponic Source at <a href="http://www.theaquaponicsource.com/">http://www.theaquaponicsource.com</a>.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/k8-9UICMgD4" width="560"></iframe></div><br /><i>Vin Armani is the host of The Vin Armani Show on <a href="http://www.activistpost.com/">Activist Post</a>, TV Star of Gigolos on Showtime, Author, DJ, and Agorist Entrepreneur. Follow <a href="https://twitter.com/vinarmani">Vin on Twitter</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/VinArmani">subscribe on YouTube</a>. Get the weekly podcast on <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-vin-armani-show/id1176246726?mt=2">iTunes</a> or <a href="http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/activist-post/vin-armani-show?refid=stpr">Stitcher</a>.</i></div>http://localorg.blogspot.com/2016/11/aquaponics-expert-jd-sawyer-talks-about.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Land Destroyer)tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7079343630025538378.post-3553758821531411707Fri, 25 Nov 2016 23:31:00 +00002016-11-25T15:31:04.179-08:00artificialIntelligencebiotechITSciTechAI & Biotech: Striking a Technological Balance of Power <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><b>November 26, 2016</b> (Tony Cartalucci - LocalOrg) - During World War 2, nations desperately raced to harness the atom. The United State ultimately won that race, and during their victory lap - being the sole nation to possess nuclear weapons - used them against their enemy Japan - twice.<br /><br />Tens of thousands of lives were extinguished in the blink of an eye and Japan, already a defeated nation, submitted absolutely to US hegemony which would prevail both over Japan and most of Asia for nearly a century onward.<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-kZV_Buwy_B0/WDiipdpHkpI/AAAAAAAAO08/aBESQl9TxAA5GOXTAU2Dtw9IN72_JepzwCLcB/s1600/Atomic_bombing_of_Japans.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="378" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-kZV_Buwy_B0/WDiipdpHkpI/AAAAAAAAO08/aBESQl9TxAA5GOXTAU2Dtw9IN72_JepzwCLcB/s640/Atomic_bombing_of_Japans.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: left;"><i><b>Images</b>: The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is what uncontested military superiority - or an imbalance of technological and military power - looks like. What will similar disparity in artificial intelligence or biotechnology lead to?&nbsp;</i></td></tr></tbody></table><br />Since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US has used its immense economic disparity over the last seven decades to build a conventional army and employ various methods of overtly and covertly attacking, undermining, and even overthrowing the political and socioeconomic orders of targeted nations worldwide in its bid to take, hold, and expand global hegemony.<br /><br />It has used its domination of the media to sell wars, manipulate public perception, and project its socioeconomic, cultural, and military will to the far reaches of the planet.<br /><br />With the advent of the Internet and social media, its domination over both allowed it to plunge the entire Middle East and North Africa (MENA) into chaos and eventually war in 2011 during the so-called "Arab Spring," a fact the New York Times in an article titled, "<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/world/15aid.html">U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings</a>," would later admit.<br /><br /><b>Balancing Power&nbsp;</b><br /><br />With each form of tactical and technological disparity manifesting itself in military aggression, subjugation, exploitation, and immeasurable injustice, attempts to diminish that disparity have helped strike a balance of power.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-CjL_i7dgAGM/WDi8t2rNvdI/AAAAAAAAO1Q/8RgzIsiSHVU5UIJ9xpz6o-qwcvzd0sxFgCLcB/s1600/1021422466.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="346" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-CjL_i7dgAGM/WDi8t2rNvdI/AAAAAAAAO1Q/8RgzIsiSHVU5UIJ9xpz6o-qwcvzd0sxFgCLcB/s640/1021422466.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><b>Image: </b>Russian mobile nuclear missiles and the reason why the United States never used nuclear weapons again.</i></td></tr></tbody></table><br />The development of nuclear weapons by the Soviets, then later China, India, and Pakistan as well as several European powers, helped strike a balance of power within which no nation dared strike another with such weapons again.<br /><br />Asymmetrical warfare and increasingly sophisticated and prolific anti-tank and anti-air weaponry have allowed nations to raise the cost of US military adventures abroad to the point where direct military intervention has become all but impossible for the US (and other nations as well).<br /><br />The alternative media has brought to an end what was almost total domination by the Western media over global public perception - and it has done so not only with the emergence of effective state-run media beyond the West, but also through the efforts of thousands of individuals and independent networks worldwide.<br /><br /><a name='more'></a>In other words, novelty provides those who pioneer and monopolize any given tactic or technology with an initial and significant advantage, but the democratization (widespread distribution) of these tactics and technologies minimizes this disparity and creates a balance of power that makes it difficult for any one party to take advantage of or dominate another.<br /><br /><b>Preventing Future Imbalances: Biotechnology&nbsp;</b><br /><b><br /></b>Perhaps the most &nbsp;frightening impending disparities humanity now faces are those in the fields of biotechnology and artificial intelligence.<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-TX610fwS1y4/WDi-Mi1jOqI/AAAAAAAAO1g/12QC9638S6EtPfGLIPt-46z9CTVs-4aKACLcB/s1600/ksmithrrlelectronic-microscope-room.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="360" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-TX610fwS1y4/WDi-Mi1jOqI/AAAAAAAAO1g/12QC9638S6EtPfGLIPt-46z9CTVs-4aKACLcB/s640/ksmithrrlelectronic-microscope-room.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: left;"><i><b>Image:</b> South Africa's Rodeplaat Research Laboratories, where genocidal scientists under Project Coast sought to weaponize vaccines to sterilize, even eradicate the nation's black population.&nbsp;</i></td></tr></tbody></table><br />The sequencing of the human genome has given rise to the practice of "gene therapy" - the ability to overwrite parts of an individual's genetic code. In other words, genetic code can now be introduced into living patients that show cells in the body <a href="http://www.cancerresearch.org/news-publications/video-gallery/emily-whitehead-beats-cancer-with-immunotherapy">how to find and eradicate cancer</a>, how to <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/11025689/Groundbreaking-gene-therapy-trial-offers-hope-to-heart-patients.html">rebuild heart muscles</a>, or <a href="http://www.med.wisc.edu/news-events/gene-therapy-for-type-1-diabetes-aims-to-eliminate-daily-insulin-injections/41450">how to properly produce insulin</a> in the case of patients suffering from diabetes.<br /><br />But if code can be introduced so precisely to do great good, it can also be introduced to do great harm. Vaccines laced with vectors delivering the genetic equivalent of malware could potentially, and very subtly, reduce fertility, diminish intelligence, and even manipulate gene expression associated with human behavior.<br /><br />The prospect of using the concepts behind gene therapy for biological weapons was mentioned in the Neo-Conservative Project for a New American Century's (PNAC) 2000 report titled, "<a href="http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf">Rebuilding America's Defenses" (.pdf)</a>. The chilling report stated (emphasis added):&nbsp;<blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>The proliferation of ballistic and cruise missiles and long-range unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) will make it much easier to project military power around the globe. Munitions themselves will become increasingly accurate, while new methods of attack – electronic, “non-lethal,” biological – will be more widely available. (<a href="http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf">p.71 of .pdf</a>)&nbsp;</i></blockquote>It also stated:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>Although it may take several decade for the process of transformation to unfold, in time, the art of warfare on air, land, and sea will be vastly different than it is today, <b>and “combat” likely will take place in new dimensions: in space, “cyber-space,” and perhaps the world of microbes.</b> (<a href="http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf">p.72 of .pdf</a>)</i><i><br /></i></blockquote>And finally: <br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i></i><i><b>And advanced forms of biological warfare that can “target” specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.</b> (<a href="http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf">p.72 of .pdf</a>)</i></blockquote><div>By democratizing this technology, we ensure that the tools used to create and defend against <i>"biological warfare that can "target" specific geneotypes"</i> are in the hands of not only people who seek to do so already, but also in vastly more hands that seek to detect, prevent, or counter such abuses. Democratizing this technology also ensures that the people who need it most get it, rather than remain subjected to the whims and interests of a handful of corporations who seek profits over people and purpose. &nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>Work toward democratizing biotechnology is being undertaken by both institutions and individuals alike, around the world through opensource biotech tools, and community "DIYbio" labs. Nations are also working to build up their biotech infrastructure, both as a component to their healthcare systems and economy, <a href="http://journal-neo.org/2016/02/07/zika-why-biotech-is-imperative-to-national-security/">and as a component of national security</a>.&nbsp;</div><div><br /><b>Artificial Intelligence</b></div><div><br /></div><div>Artificial intelligence, long before we must worry about sentient machines and what they may or may not decide to do with a vastly inferior humanity, is already being used in highly specialized applications ranging from automatically extracting intelligence from the millions of photos uploaded to Facebook daily, to gaming the stock market, to <a href="https://deepmind.com/blog/working-nhs-build-lifesaving-technology/">managing the UK's National Health Service (NHS)</a>, to <a href="https://deepmind.com/blog/deepmind-ai-reduces-google-data-centre-cooling-bill-40/">automatically managing utility grids</a>.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>While many uses of AI are benign, the fact that so few institutions are engaged in high-level AI research and applications invites immense disparity and abuse. While AI applications today do not constitute a sentient being superior to humans in every conceivable way, they do constitute very focused algorithms that are vastly superior to any human performing the same specific task.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-fh5bkld5tqQ/WDi-0TvqE5I/AAAAAAAAO1k/j8kYBXfHImMXV6SkBhBULmkSKNWX7AWKgCLcB/s1600/AlphaGo-Lee-Sedol-Aja-Huang.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="424" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-fh5bkld5tqQ/WDi-0TvqE5I/AAAAAAAAO1k/j8kYBXfHImMXV6SkBhBULmkSKNWX7AWKgCLcB/s640/AlphaGo-Lee-Sedol-Aja-Huang.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div>Google's DeepMind subsidiary, <a href="https://deepmind.com/research/alphago/">and their AI AlphaGo</a> was able to learn and then outplay the world's best Go player. Other developers are creating AI platforms that can learn through trial and error how to play various video games before eventually mastering them with super-human reflexes and strategies.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>Applied to games, they are quaint. Applied to warfare and they are terrifying. The high-speed, ultra-deadly nature of the first Gulf War in which the technological disparity between the US and Iraqi forces left the fourth largest military on Earth in ruination and retreat will be tame in comparison if and when machine learning is applied to real-world military operations.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>The increasing use of drones and automation, and the eventual combination of the two, will create a network an AI simply needs to plug into and direct, either entirely or temporarily, to grant its operators a super-human advantage over their unprepared opponents.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>And such contests need not be waged on conventional battlefields. Cyber and information warfare may also present a tempting battlefield upon which to deploy AI. Targeting the IT infrastructure of an opposing nation, or mass manipulating public perception with increasingly convincing AI 'bots" working ceaselessly to create the illusion of persuasive consensus, could overwhelm unprepared opponents.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jtMsuTXGjZo/WDi-5ho7QdI/AAAAAAAAO1o/YYVKaCUZkOEF-7Fb4rOvKpk7Vlu5C7VRACLcB/s1600/9cd6a0e38e6751582d17574a03e6990d.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="392" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jtMsuTXGjZo/WDi-5ho7QdI/AAAAAAAAO1o/YYVKaCUZkOEF-7Fb4rOvKpk7Vlu5C7VRACLcB/s640/9cd6a0e38e6751582d17574a03e6990d.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div>Just like DeepMind's AlphaGo left its human opponent utterly, hopelessly defeated, so too would any military wielding a militarized AI algorithm. However, the ability to multiply force through the use of artificial intelligence is only an advantage if those it is being used against lack similar capabilities.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>Artificial intelligence is not just a component of Facebook or Google's business strategy - US policymakers admit that AI, as well as companies like Facebook and Google themselves, constitute an integral part of creating, maintaining, and projecting American power globally. Nations must not look upon AI as a novelty or an economic asset, but also as a central component to national security. Nations depending on Facebook and Google to prop up their IT infrastructure rather than brewing their own national alternatives are akin to nations during the age of empires inviting British gunboats into their harbors.</div><div><br /></div><div>Artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and other forms of emerging technology must be viewed by each nation, state, community, and individual not as a mere novelty or potential industry, but also as a potential means to grant those who develop and monopolize it economic, political, and even military superiority history has taught us they most certainly will abuse.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>Just like the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki could never have fathomed the destructive power of the atomic weapons used against them, let alone anticipate they personally would fall victims to such weapons, we too allow ourselves to tempt fate by waiting for the first biological or AI strike before establishing a deterrence through a balance of power.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>We are increasingly connected and empowered by the Internet and other forms of technology already being democratized. We know about emerging technology and we can easily find ways to either raise awareness regarding these issues or directly involve ourselves in the actual process of democratizing this technology. We can and we must, lest we languish under the mushroom clouds and in all-consuming fire ignorance, unpreparedness, and technological disparity invites.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div><i style="background-color: white; font-family: &quot;trebuchet ms&quot;, trebuchet, verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 15.4px;"><b style="font-size: 15.4px;"><span style="color: #0b5394;"><a href="http://localorg.blogspot.com/" style="color: #1155cc; text-decoration: none;">LocalOrg</a></span></b><span style="font-size: 15.4px;">&nbsp;seeks to explore local solutions to global problems by empowering people locally with education and technology to not only survive, but to thrive.</span></i></div></div>http://localorg.blogspot.com/2016/11/ai-biotech-striking-technological.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Land Destroyer)tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7079343630025538378.post-9040853339312243508Wed, 16 Nov 2016 19:28:00 +00002016-11-16T11:28:44.739-08:00solutionsThere's a Real Revolution Taking Place, and It's Already Making a Difference <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><b>November 17, 2016</b>&nbsp;(via&nbsp;<a href="https://www.corbettreport.com/notmypresident-draintheswamp-the-real-revolution-is-already-here/">The Corbett Report</a>) - James Corbett of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.corbettreport.com/notmypresident-draintheswamp-the-real-revolution-is-already-here/">The Corbett Report</a>&nbsp;lays out the dimensions of a very real revolution already taking place. It is built upon pragmatic, technical solutions that liberate us from centralized monopolize of power, industry, finance, and society.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/QVJo-3JbCdY" width="560"></iframe></div><br /><br />These include solutions regarding the decentralization of manufacturing, energy, finance, and much more:<br /><div style="background-color: white; color: #555555; margin-bottom: 15px;"></div><ul><li><a href="https://www.corbettreport.com/episode-303-solutions-the-peer-to-peer-economy/" style="color: blue; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Solutions: The Peer-to-Peer Economy</a></li><li><a href="https://www.corbettreport.com/episode-251-solutions-3d-printing/" style="color: blue; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Solutions: 3D Printing</a></li><li><a href="https://www.corbettreport.com/anarchy-in-action-spontaneous-order/" style="color: blue; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Anarchy in Action: Spontaneous Order</a></li><li><a href="https://www.corbettreport.com/dear-government-deliver-us-from-freedom/" style="color: blue; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Dear Government, Deliver Us From Freedom</a></li><li><a href="https://www.corbettreport.com/p2p-solutions-an-open-source-investigation/" style="color: blue; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">P2P Solutions: An Open Source Investigation</a></li><li><a href="https://www.corbettreport.com/solutions-freedom-cells/" style="color: blue; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Solutions: Freedom Cells</a></li><li><a href="https://www.corbettreport.com/episode-309-solutions-agorism/" style="color: blue; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Solutions: Agorism</a></li><li><a href="https://www.corbettreport.com/episode-283-solutions-make-your-own-media/" style="color: blue; font-family: inherit; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Solutions: Make Your Own Media</a><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: inherit;">&nbsp;&nbsp;</span></li></ul><br /><div style="text-align: left;">Other articles, like this one&nbsp;<a href="http://localorg.blogspot.com/2016/11/fighting-real-deplorables.html">from LocalOrg</a>, relay a similar message, and together this quiet, "untelevised" revolution is already making a difference around the world - whether it is the organic food movement shifting the tides against big-ag, or the alternative media shifting the balance of power away from state-sponsored propaganda.<br /><br />You do not need to wait for the next election to oppose a system you see as corrupt. There are things you can do in your everyday life to deny this system your time, money, attention, and money, and direct it all towards building the sort of world you truly want to live in.&nbsp;</div><br />Read more at&nbsp;<a href="https://www.corbettreport.com/notmypresident-draintheswamp-the-real-revolution-is-already-here/">The Corbett Report here</a>. &nbsp;</div>http://localorg.blogspot.com/2016/11/theres-real-revolution-taking-place-and.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Land Destroyer)tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7079343630025538378.post-5571004532313708052Sun, 13 Nov 2016 18:12:00 +00002016-11-13T10:12:37.080-08:00solutionsFighting the (Real) Deplorables <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><b>November 13, 2016</b> (LocalOrg) - Across America, protests have broken out. They are small, poorly organized, and poorly led. They lack any realistic goal, so clearly, lack any actual plan to achieve any sort of goal. And unfortunately, they have become violent, embodying the very sort of hate, intimidation, and victimization the protesters claim they are fighting against.<br /><br /><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-9eBPQ_XM9qk/WCisLsSOIGI/AAAAAAAAOvs/lgzxT-aTnSgjhhE0jK9hl71C9OM5GP5WgCLcB/s1600/7.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="438" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-9eBPQ_XM9qk/WCisLsSOIGI/AAAAAAAAOvs/lgzxT-aTnSgjhhE0jK9hl71C9OM5GP5WgCLcB/s640/7.jpg" width="640" /></a><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><br />The truth is, as the protests currently exist, no matter how long they persist or how big they get, they will accomplish nothing positive, and instead, invite a wide variety of very serious negatives. <br /><br />All Americans, and those overseas looking in, must logically admit that neither Hillary Clinton nor now President-elect, Donald Trump, truly represented the American people. Neither were drawn from the people, neither have a record of service to the people, and both have been deeply entrenched in a corrupt system dominated absolutely by corporate-financier special interests. In many ways, both Clinton and Trump in fact constitute those special interests.<br /><br />This reality means that it is not &nbsp;"Clinton" or "Trump" that either side was voting for or against, but different aspects of the same corrupt system they find abhorrent and in desperate need of changing. It was not "Clinton" or "Trump" that people were voting for, but their opponents they were voting against. It was not the arguments each candidate made that convinced them, it was the arguments of candidates and commentary by the corporate-media that repelled them.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lk5khOizTZ0/WCiQl5FugZI/AAAAAAAAOuI/sM-evcPWnT49R871T98BLC78Yzk6mvYAgCLcB/s1600/CorporateMap.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="350" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lk5khOizTZ0/WCiQl5FugZI/AAAAAAAAOuI/sM-evcPWnT49R871T98BLC78Yzk6mvYAgCLcB/s640/CorporateMap.jpg" width="640" /></a><br /><br />It is a singularly corrupt system, using smoke and mirrors to convince at least a part of society to support at least a part of its continued existence, under either "right" or "left" cover.<br /><br />Hillary Clinton once infamously declared:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>...you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables...</i></blockquote>But the truth is, it is not Trump supporters, and not Clinton supporters - none of the American people who are "deplorables."<br /><br />It is the system that is deplorable. It is the corporate-financier special interests who are deplorable for monopolizing and dominating every aspect of the American people's lives for profit and power. It is the politicians who are deplorable for selling themselves to these interests while posing as public servants and representatives. It is the corporate media who helps both special interests and their pet politicians pander to the public, mislead them, confuse them, and most deplorable of all, divide them against one another.<br /><br /><b></b><br /><a name='more'></a><b>Fighting the Deplorables&nbsp;</b><br /><br />Here is where most commentary trails off into a rhetorical rant, peddling political ideals that are just as meaningless as a solution as the rhetoric that has created the problem at hand. Instead, it is far more constructive to explain to you that while a small handful of elite have taken a majority stake in both America and the world for their own benefit and at the cost of everyone else, there are very specific actions you can take right now to take your own stake, and use that to introduce an element of balance to both national and international power.<br /><br />At the heart of Washington there lies an engine of corporate-financier special interests. They are not simply men and women with immense amounts of money and power. They are men and women who control essential things required for civilization's continued existence, including agriculture, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, energy, transportation, defense, technology, education, commerce, and monetary systems.<br /><br />To take your own stake in the game, you must do so by creating alternatives to these vast monopolies.<br /><br /><b>Toe-to-Toe With the Deplorables&nbsp;</b><br /><br />Big-agriculture, big-retail, big-oil, big-retail, big-pharmaceutical corporations, and big-banks (and many more). Any corporation or institution that enjoys a commanding monopoly over the essential functions of modern human civilization falls into the category of "deplorables." They hold the levers of modern civilization within their hands, and they are the ones that have directed us along the course we currently find ourselves on. They, not one half of the population they have convinced to think differently than the other before pitting both halves against one another, are the problem.<br /><br />Replacing them is the solution.<br /><b><br /></b><b>1. Big-Agriculture:</b>&nbsp;Food is an obvious essential every living being on Earth requires to sustain themselves. The control over a people's food supply has been instrumental for defining the "haves" and the "have nots" throughout human history. It is the most essential element to safeguard in order to achieve supremacy over another, and it is the most essential element to undermine when dismantling the source of another's power.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-vrlKKPsOQVo/WCiUqFwULCI/AAAAAAAAOug/O29QKLWf18ct6gIyxgkByaP_lXerCljJACLcB/s1600/2564490.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="360" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-vrlKKPsOQVo/WCiUqFwULCI/AAAAAAAAOug/O29QKLWf18ct6gIyxgkByaP_lXerCljJACLcB/s640/2564490.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br />Big-agriculture, including corporations like Bayer, Dow, BASF, DuPont, Monsanto, Syngenta, Cargill, John Deere, Tyson, and many others, not to mention the big-retailers they are partnered with to move their products and services, not only monopolize the American food supply, but threaten food security globally. They have not only deeply infiltrated governments, but have exerted unwarranted and insidious influence across the media directly, and indirectly through "independent third parties" that perform lobbying services without disclosing their status as lobbyists.<br /><br /><b>Solutions:</b> Fighting big-agriculture is easy, and it's already a fight that is well on its way toward victory. &nbsp;Networks of organic farmers, farmers' markets, urban agriculture networks, together with the alternative media and organic advocates, have already begun changing the tide, raising public awareness about:<br /><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The benefits of healthy, clean, organic food;</li><li>The empowerment that comes with community agriculture;</li><li>The economic benefits of more equally distributed agricultural entrepreneurship and;&nbsp;</li><li>The sociopolitical impact of taking a stake in our collective food security.&nbsp;</li></ul><div>And getting started is easy. There are entire networks that not only produce locally grown food for their communities, but have created infrastructure to teach absolute beginners how to get involved in agriculture, both rural and urban. Permaculture Voices hosts a variety of speakers sharing the work of their networks and is a good place to find one that suits you most.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1MNhtcagNO0" width="560"></iframe></div><br />One particularly impressive urban farmer is Curtis Stone of Canada. He is living proof that local agriculture is not only a theoretical solution to shifting the balance of power in the people's favor, it is a practical solution tangibly making a change.<br /><br />Something as simple as tearing up your lawn and planting a garden can be the pathway toward creating a sustainable and profitable business. At the same time, you are redirecting money locally your community would otherwise be channeling into big-ag by providing them with a superior alternative. It can be done, regardless of rules, regulations, and social pressures placed in your way, you simply need to be creative and determined enough to find the solutions - and likely, someone in the existing and ever-growing organic food movement has already faced and overcome such challenges. Seek them out and learn from them. There is no excuse.<br /><br />If you have energy to walk around in the streets all night destroying your neighborhood, you have energy to get together the next day and plant a community garden or start your own independent, socially responsible and prosperous farming operation. Be the change you want to see in the world.<br /><br />If you don't aspire to be a farmer, there are other things you can do:<br /><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Support local farmers and farmers' markets;&nbsp;</li><li>Grow a fraction of your own food in a home garden, even 1% is better than 0%,&nbsp;</li><li>Be more conscious when you buy, not only to shift the sociopolitical and economic paradigm, but for your health and;</li><li>Start a blog to advocate local, national, and international networks you see making a difference - the more voices out there, the harder it is for corporate-funded propaganda to drown them out.</li></ul>Creating a larger and more powerful organic movement, distributed among communities, but collectively representing the same basic principles of healthy, affordable, local food, creates another point of leverage against existing monopolies - the weight of policy demands backed by a physical network of producers, farmers, alternative media networks, and loyal customers who don't just buy their food to eat, but buy it because they know it is better, and comes from their very own community.<br /><br />It is a powerful point of leverage that is already putting demonstrable strain upon big-ag, forcing them to expose themselves, their methods, and true ambitions on public display, resort to ever increasingly desperate tactics, and expend vast amounts of resources to maintain what is becoming an unsustainable monopoly.<br /><br />Big-ag is happy to ignore protesters waving signs. They cannot ignore growing segments of the population eating food produced outside their monopoly. They can either reform, or live in a world increasingly moving on into the future without them.<br /><br /><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7wkdExQCvZg/WCiUQxbHRPI/AAAAAAAAOuc/Tt6W0pGncFMIrmL3wyqYdCQF2o-llS6gwCLcB/s1600/Major-Oil-Companies.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7wkdExQCvZg/WCiUQxbHRPI/AAAAAAAAOuc/Tt6W0pGncFMIrmL3wyqYdCQF2o-llS6gwCLcB/s320/Major-Oil-Companies.jpg" width="320" /></a><b>2. Big-Oil: </b>Chevron, Exxon, BP, Shell, ConocoPhillips, coal companies, and the corrupt despots of the Persian Gulf who have built evil empires upon their fields of crude, blacken our skies and our lungs with their toxic fuels. Our power plants and cars have burned these toxic fuels for decades. While alternatives exist, and indeed, some nations - like Iceland - have moved beyond petrochemicals and coal, big-oil and energy monopolies have used their power and influence to perpetuate their monopolies and the centralization of energy production at the detriment of human civilization.<br /><br /><br />Whether or not you believe such fuels are contributing to climate change is irrelevant. You need only stand on a city street corner for 5 minutes during rush hour to feel your health being destroyed, or look at the wars and compromising political partnerships and rivalries our governments have become entangled in to realize an alternative is necessary.<br /><br /><b>Solutions: </b>Localizing energy production is not as easy as growing your own food - which is in itself probably not as easy as some might think. But it is also not impossible. Energy cooperatives exist all over the world already, ranging from wind and solar power to biogas production.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-lMj9g0KEumU/WCiTyXFWRzI/AAAAAAAAOuU/2LSHNz8ftRcZOFBgMGF_cjzEQv5sDkwVwCLcB/s1600/cumbria9.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="358" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-lMj9g0KEumU/WCiTyXFWRzI/AAAAAAAAOuU/2LSHNz8ftRcZOFBgMGF_cjzEQv5sDkwVwCLcB/s640/cumbria9.png" width="640" /></a></div><br />In Farmers Weekly's article, "<a href="http://www.fwi.co.uk/business/community-energy-is-the-future.html">Farm Power: Community energy is the future</a>," explains:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>Involving local communities in renewable energy schemes can help farmers get projects off the ground and deliver benefits well beyond the farm gate.&nbsp;</i><i><br /></i><i><br /></i><i>Community energy schemes are still in their infancy in the UK compared with elsewhere in Europe, but momentum is clearly building.&nbsp;</i><i><br /></i><i><br /></i><i>More than 5,000 community groups have undertaken energy initiatives in the last five years and the publication of the UK’s first Community Energy Strategy (CES) last year promised a “step change” for the sector and a significant expansion over the next three years.</i></blockquote>The article goes on to detail just how such cooperatives work.<br /><br />Additionally, there are companies like US-based <a href="http://www.solarcity.com/">Solar City</a> that produces and installs solar panels on household rooftops, <a href="https://www.tesla.com/">Tesla</a> that produces electric cars and battery banks called <a href="https://www.tesla.com/powerwall">Powerwalls</a> for storing energy at home. These high profile companies have inspired many others across the country and around the world to begin moving solar power deeper into mainstream power production.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-esxMadpQ61Y/WCiT7GZOGpI/AAAAAAAAOuY/WB7boufmjDAzkhDpGxCh2IUVjsoCBinsgCLcB/s1600/shutterstock_106124045_7.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-esxMadpQ61Y/WCiT7GZOGpI/AAAAAAAAOuY/WB7boufmjDAzkhDpGxCh2IUVjsoCBinsgCLcB/s400/shutterstock_106124045_7.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>While in some cases, solar power is still a huge investment compared to living on the grid, prices are dropping toward a future where that isn't the case. Many already find solar power to be a better solution than drawing from centralized power grids, and in places where grids don't reach, solar already dominates power production.<br /><br />Solar power and other community or individually owned and operated power grids decentralizes another of human civilization's essential building blocks. The people themselves possessing complete control over this particular block, further lends them leverage against monopolies that for decades have used their control over energy to impose their will upon the fate of entire nations.<br /><br />There is a learning curve to overcome when getting into alternative energy but there are many people already out there doing it both for profit and to make a difference. Just as there are people among the organic movement willing to share their knowledge with those willing to seek them out and learn, so too are there people in the alternative energy community. Seek them out, and learn.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vYo8mcHI4n8/WCiZRfjbjhI/AAAAAAAAOvA/QX72iJTZZN8vUXR4En0fObgl1pG__VguwCLcB/s1600/WalMart_StopGIMP.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vYo8mcHI4n8/WCiZRfjbjhI/AAAAAAAAOvA/QX72iJTZZN8vUXR4En0fObgl1pG__VguwCLcB/s320/WalMart_StopGIMP.jpg" width="256" /></a></div><b>3. Big-Retail:</b> Our food, our manufactured goods, our technology, and much more often comes from big retailers. In the US it is WalMart and Target. In Europe and Asia it includes BigC, Tesco, Carrefour, and other retailing monopolies. When these mega-stores open up, people trade in local socioeconomic independence for cheap junk consolidated for convenience in a single location.<br /><br />But what seems like a blessing at first, becomes a curse over time. Pretty soon, towns dominated by these big-retailers find themselves completely at the mercy of them and a handful of "chain" restaurants and specialty stores. Local development is nonexistent, because the summation of wealth is often created by working for these stores, and paid to them - much like exploitative and abusive "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store">company stores</a>" during the Industrial Revolution.<br /><br /><b>Solutions:</b> However, manufacturing can be brought back to our communities through advances in manufacturing technology and innovative institutions often called "makerspaces" or "hackerspaces."<br /><br />Computer controlled manufacturing such as 3D printing, laser cutters and computer-controlled routers have become small and cheap enough for individuals to use in their homes, but more often than not, they are found in makerspaces where even absolute beginners can get help in designing and manufacturing their ideas. The technology is not well suited for mass production, but it doesn't need to. It can deliver short-runs of items, or create other manufacturing systems that can be used for larger scales of production (molds, vacuum forming, etc).<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bJumkLrl7IY/WCiY6l04sNI/AAAAAAAAOu8/tCZaAz9BN_E9o0o1FC2bGEOUyhWXTm8twCLcB/s1600/08_firstbuild-hackathon-28.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bJumkLrl7IY/WCiY6l04sNI/AAAAAAAAOu8/tCZaAz9BN_E9o0o1FC2bGEOUyhWXTm8twCLcB/s640/08_firstbuild-hackathon-28.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br />China, famous for being the "factory of the world," already has seen the advancement of manufacturing technology chip away at its domination over mass production. Companies that once used Chinese factories to produce items can now afford their own machines which not only cuts out shipping costs, but gives them greater control over quality and customization.<br /><br />Makerspaces are popping up <a href="https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/List_of_Hacker_Spaces">all over the world</a>. In North America and Europe they are virtually everywhere. Search online for the one nearest you. The people there are friendly and eager to expand their already growing community and are hungry for challenges related to the practical application of the tools, talent, and machinery they have in their spaces.<br /><br />For both ordinary people and aspiring entrepreneurs, makerspaces often serve as the starting line for entire companies and new innovations. Waiting for mega-corporations like Apple, IBM, Google, and others to lead us along is no longer necessary. When you want something, instead of paying into the local "company store," why not learn a new skill, make it, and perhaps even start a small business making more for your friends, family, neighbors - and with crowd sourcing like Kickstarter, to the rest of the world?<br /><br />We have gone <a href="http://localorg.blogspot.com/2012/12/decenralize-big-retail.html">into great detail specifically on decentralizing big-retail</a>, including profiling some of the progress that was already made as early as 2012. Since then, so much more progress has been made, and the community is simply waiting for the rest of society to end their dependence on consumerism, and try their hand at being producers, designers, makers, and doers.<br /><br />And while there is an upper limit to what you can get at a big-retail store today, there is no upper limit to what can be made locally leveraging modern computer controlled manufacturing. Opensource car designs are being built in America in "microfactories" by a company called <a href="https://localmotors.com/">Local Motors</a>&nbsp;and represents a proof-of-concept in <a href="http://localorg.blogspot.com/2012/11/decentralizing-vehicle-design.html">decentralizing something as formidable and centralized as the auto industry</a>.<br /><b><br /></b><b>4. Big-Pharmaceuticals: </b>Like big-ag, big-pharma is undoubtedly a deplorable. Corporations like GlaxoKlineSmith (GSK), Bayer, Lilly, Merck, Pfizer, Roche, and many, many more, have been not only accused, but convicted in courts of law around the globe for <a href="http://journal-neo.org/2014/06/04/glaxo-s-china-scandal-exposes-big-pharma-s-ugly-underworld/">some of the largest cases of healthcare fraud and abuse in human history</a>. Yet they are still charged by governments around the world with the research, development, production, and distribution of medications human beings rely on to live.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-kIA-lfxBuDc/WCid8WMVDQI/AAAAAAAAOvQ/1LBRDXbQJFUI6v7fGA3f_NjJdxYTEXFegCLcB/s1600/2013-5-24_GSK.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="358" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-kIA-lfxBuDc/WCid8WMVDQI/AAAAAAAAOvQ/1LBRDXbQJFUI6v7fGA3f_NjJdxYTEXFegCLcB/s640/2013-5-24_GSK.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br />What's worse is that much of the "research and development" big-pharma is engaged in, is late-stage preparations to bring drugs to market - drugs that have been developed through public funding for years, sometimes even decades. These special interests have infiltrated regulatory and government bodies so deeply, they are able to acquire, then criminally exploit the results of publicly funded research for immense profits.<br /><br />Worse still, many of the products produced and distributed by big-pharma are either ineffective, or outright dangerous, many times being subscribed for symptoms and uses they were not even approved for.<br /><br /><b>Solutions; </b>While harder than both food production and energy independence, decentralizing human healthcare is still not impossible.<br /><br />Community labs (<a href="https://diybio.org/local/">a list of labs around the world</a>) built around the concept of do-it-yourself biology (DIYbio) are also spreading around the world. Makerspaces - with their special mixture of talent and technology - are able to quickly produce prototypes and opensource versions of expensive proprietary hospital and lab equipment otherwise inaccessible to community healthcare infrastructure. If enough people interested in healthcare and biology assemble at a particular makerspace, a lab is usually established. <br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-BKwKR9-mrWA/WCidzTAbhNI/AAAAAAAAOvM/u8sd06AVwAINYJp2Dt_eq4KlB6oJk0tUACLcB/s1600/DIY-bio-graphic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="432" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-BKwKR9-mrWA/WCidzTAbhNI/AAAAAAAAOvM/u8sd06AVwAINYJp2Dt_eq4KlB6oJk0tUACLcB/s640/DIY-bio-graphic.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><br />In the US, there already is a program where <a href="http://makernurse.com/">makerspaces are actually being established within hospitals</a>, allowing nurses, technicians, and doctors to prototype and manufacture solutions to problems they encounter during their work. This concept is beginning to spread around the world to other hospitals where makerspace mainstays like 3D printing are being used for everything from creating physical models of patients' organs to assist in the planning stages for difficult surgeries, to creating customized hooks, fasteners, and attachments for existing equipment that are expensive or impossible to replace otherwise.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/aodPEbnX_qg" width="560"></iframe></div><br />Makerspaces are also increasingly collaborating with university labs, hospitals, and other healthcare providers and institutions. This tangible progress in human healthcare helps open up the technology used to administer and advance it, lowering the overall costs in providing it to patients - a much more sustainable solution than subsidies alone.<br /><br />The collective knowledge communities acquire during these collaborations helps decentralize healthcare.<br /><br />In terms of pharmaceuticals, there are <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Py5TkirrO-U">even groups working on opensource bioreactors</a> (basically just glass containers with computer controlled temperature, stirring, and mixing functions) and computer software to make brewing pharmaceuticals as cheap and as easy as a cooking recipe. While this exists more on the cutting edge of healthcare decentralization, it proves that it is possible, and the more people that get involved, the quicker it will go from cutting edge to commonplace. <br /><br />If you have an interest in medicine, biology, or human health, simply use your Internet search engine of choice and find a group active near you.<br /><br /><b>5. Big-Banks: </b>Currency is the lifeblood of commerce. Regardless of your economic system of choice, money is necessary to make it function. Control over currency and funding grants institutions and special interests immense power over commerce, and thus virtually every aspect of human civilization. Decentralizing this power introduces balance and reduces the scale of abuse one can exercise through any given monetary system.<br /><br />Alternatives are difficult to establish, but not impossible. And while current alternatives are not perfect, if one's interest is in monetary policy and monetary systems, then there is a growing community they can join to improve these alternatives.<br /><br /><b>Solutions: </b>Cryptocurrencies and crowd funding are two such innovations that are giving people alternatives to current monetary systems as well as the raising of funds for projects. <a href="https://bitcoin.org/en/">Bitcoin</a> is just one of several cryptocurrencies and there are a growing number of crowdfunding platforms including <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/">Kickstarter</a> and <a href="https://www.patreon.com/about">Patreon</a>. <br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Q1B0BRoJRkM" width="560"></iframe></div><br />Cryptocurrencies and crowdfunding help oil this system of alternatives growing from increasingly high-tech, decentralized solutions to the corrupt monopolies at the source of our sociopolitical and economic troubles.<br /><br />It should be noted that many alternative media sites, not only political, but covering all subjects, from science and technology, to entertainment and education - increasingly rely on sites like Patreon to channel funding from their viewers and expand their work in a sustainable and responsive way to what their audiences want. This stands in stark contrast to the sponsored media currently dominating Western audiences' attention, presenting them messages and perspectives that suit the corporate-financier interests funding them, not the people consuming their content.<br /><br /><b>Displace the Deplorables&nbsp;</b><br /><br />These are just 5 areas and but a handful of solutions among many where people are already working hard, all over the world, to build the sort of world they want to live in - a world in contrast to the injustice of centralized power and profits we currently live in. The immense problems we face today were not created by one person overnight, nor will they be solved by one person overnight. It will take many people, focusing in many different areas, patiently over time to collectively move the vector sum of human efforts toward something more equitable, just, and beneficial to us all.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fffn2f5CGD4/WCisuibDb_I/AAAAAAAAOv0/EJ9m05BegAAIAo1qeLs2ZCYhWLJkKdlYgCLcB/s1600/Farmers%2BMarket%2BHeader_a7b61bbe-74df-48ce-941c-11898697345b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fffn2f5CGD4/WCisuibDb_I/AAAAAAAAOv0/EJ9m05BegAAIAo1qeLs2ZCYhWLJkKdlYgCLcB/s640/Farmers%2BMarket%2BHeader_a7b61bbe-74df-48ce-941c-11898697345b.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br />Of these 5 areas, you need not cover them all. If you committed yourself to just one of them, and worked incrementally over the next year to achieve even the scarcest of results, you will be further ahead than if you did nothing at all. Efforts, no matter how small, add up over time. When many people are working in parallel, these small incremental steps add up even more.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-P3lsgTRWnww/WCiszWcDP9I/AAAAAAAAOv4/U5QUqh0oKWYLRGAghsuPcv7lw6p0KBjPQCLcB/s1600/3D-Prining-in-Education.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-P3lsgTRWnww/WCiszWcDP9I/AAAAAAAAOv4/U5QUqh0oKWYLRGAghsuPcv7lw6p0KBjPQCLcB/s640/3D-Prining-in-Education.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br />The only sure way to fail and effect no change at all is to resign yourself to the system currently at hand. Doing nothing, or worse yet, going out into the streets to create chaos, adds up over time as either nothing, or the destruction of what little you already have. <br /><br />Just as when we were children seeking greater independence, we were unable to obtain it by simply shouting, stomping our feet, and throwing a tantrum. We were required to grow up, acquire skills, apply them effectively, and create a life of our own, in our own way, to suit us rather than have a life imposed upon us by those we depended on. Likewise, as a society, we need to grow up, take an actual stake in this world of ours for ourselves. <br /><br />By controlling our food, water, energy, local manufacturing, monetary policy, and even our own healthcare, we invest in and derive from these efforts to our own, direct benefit. <br /><br />We must become the change we want to see in the world, not stomp our feet until someone delivers it to us. It is not "a way" to solve our problems. It is the only way problems can ever be solved. Do not join the protests, do not react to them. There is far too much work to be done to be distracted by them. Offer those who ask you about the protests to join you in a real revolution, one in which we set off to build the world we seek to live in with our own two hands rather than "demand" with our mouths.<br /><br /><i style="background-color: white; font-family: &quot;trebuchet ms&quot;, trebuchet, verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 15.4px;"><b style="font-size: 15.4px;"><span style="color: #0b5394;"><a href="http://localorg.blogspot.com/" style="color: #1155cc; text-decoration: none;">LocalOrg</a></span></b><span style="font-size: 15.4px;">&nbsp;seeks to explore local solutions to global problems by empowering people locally with education and technology to not only survive, but to thrive.</span></i></div></div>http://localorg.blogspot.com/2016/11/fighting-real-deplorables.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Land Destroyer)tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7079343630025538378.post-7293357531595698863Wed, 12 Oct 2016 18:00:00 +00002016-10-12T11:04:37.263-07:00solutions10 Things We Should Be Doing Instead of Obsessing Over the 2016 Election <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><b>October 13, 2016</b> (LocalOrg) - Here is a list of 10 things Americans should have been doing to strengthen their communities and empower themselves sociopolitically, economically, and technologically over the past 2 years instead of having obsessed over the ultimately irrelevant process known as Election 2016.<br /><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-MRSXFb9zowI/V_55vtaBiJI/AAAAAAAAOg8/Oc65OilKOkAqZxtJp7oaPAUvrXTkdzUZwCLcB/s1600/localOrg2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="342" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-MRSXFb9zowI/V_55vtaBiJI/AAAAAAAAOg8/Oc65OilKOkAqZxtJp7oaPAUvrXTkdzUZwCLcB/s640/localOrg2.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div>It is ultimately irrelevant because regardless of who wins, just like in 2008 when Barack Obama took office, all of the abuses and wars raging now will continue, and all the wars meant to begin under the previous president will be justified and executed under whoever the new president happens to be.<br /><br />Imagine if you accomplished even one of these 10 things in the list below over the past 2 years, and if many more did so as well. What a world we would live in instead of clinging to the false hope of some establishment representative finally "changing things" for us instead of just stringing us along for another 4 years...<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><b></b><br /><a name='more'></a><b>1.</b> Start a local organic farm: <a href="http://theurbanfarmer.co/">http://theurbanfarmer.co/</a> (takes about 1-2 years if you seek guidance from others already doing it).<br /><br /><b>2.</b> Visit your local makerspace/hackerspace to learn a new skill&nbsp;<a href="https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/List_of_Hacker_Spaces">https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/List_of_Hacker_Spaces</a> (can take as little as 1-2 weeks to learn a new skill)<br /><br /><b>3.</b> Use that new skill to start a local business, replacing/disrupting an established monopoly. (1-2 years)<br /><br /><b>4.</b> Replace a percentage of your power consumption with solar.&nbsp;<a href="http://www.solarcity.com/">http://www.solarcity.com/</a><br /><br /><b>5.</b> Replace a percentage of your big-retail food with food grown locally and sold at your local farmers' market.<br /><br /><b>6.</b> Visit your local community lab to learn more about disrupting big-pharma monopolies. <a href="https://diybio.org/local/">https://diybio.org/local/</a><br /><br /><b>7.</b> Grow a fraction of your own food in your own part-time hobby garden;<br /><br /><b>8.</b> Go online and teach yourself a new skill for free instead of wasting money (and ending up in debt) on a formal education&nbsp;<a href="https://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm">https://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm</a> (or learn IT skills on YouTube regarding almost any topic from 3D design to programming)<br /><br /><b>9.</b> Buy a <a href="http://localorg.blogspot.com/2014/11/3d-printing-and-age-of-disruption.html">3D printer</a> and start your own 3D design and printing service (would take about 2 years to learn everything and get good enough at it to provide a basic service for friends, family, community, and colleagues).<br /><br /><b>10.</b> Start your own blog about politics, technology, farming, gardening or anything else constructive and empowering to create networks, share information, and inspire others to break free of the current Wall Street-Washington controlled paradigm.</blockquote>None of these will transform the world overnight. However, none of the problems we face were created overnight nor will they be fixed overnight. Our problems weren't created by a single person nor will they be solved by a single person or single solution.<br /><br />It will take lots of effort along many fronts by many people to create the world we want to live in - but only if we are committed to building that world ourselves, with our own two hands, instead of constantly deferring this responsibility to others how have demonstrated they have no intention of doing so.<br /><br /><i style="background-color: white; font-family: &quot;trebuchet ms&quot;, trebuchet, verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 15.4px;"><b style="font-size: 15.4px;"><span style="color: #0b5394;"><a href="http://localorg.blogspot.com/" style="color: #1155cc;">LocalOrg</a></span></b><span style="font-size: 15.4px;">&nbsp;seeks to explore local solutions to global problems by empowering people locally with education and technology to not only survive, but to thrive.</span></i></div></div>http://localorg.blogspot.com/2016/10/10-things-we-should-be-doing-instead-of.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Land Destroyer)tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7079343630025538378.post-6372415975987200296Sun, 02 Oct 2016 17:42:00 +00002016-10-02T10:42:12.491-07:00ITGoogle’s Jigsaw: Undermining Alternative Media<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><b>October 3, 2016</b> (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4RkiiW-gtc&amp;spfreload=5">NewsBud</a>) -&nbsp;In this premier episode of The Geopolitical Report with Kurt Nimmo, we examine Google’s Jigsaw, an emerging technology that will be used on the internet to counter speech and ideas considered “extremist” by the global elite. Initially beta tested on radical Islamists, we demonstrate how Google and its partners plan to leverage the technology to marginalize and ultimately eliminate opposition to the establishment.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/g4RkiiW-gtc" width="560"></iframe> <br /><div style="text-align: left;">See more via NewsBud's <b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdHZela1qTNM9iIw2YxenIw">YouTube channel here</a></b>.&nbsp;</div></div></div>http://localorg.blogspot.com/2016/10/googles-jigsaw-undermining-alternative.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Land Destroyer)tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7079343630025538378.post-1903959111993404437Sun, 02 Oct 2016 17:39:00 +00002016-10-02T10:39:14.956-07:00Facebook, Twitter, Western Media Attempt to Reassert Monopoly Over "Truth" <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><span style="font-size: large;">A network whose members have literally ended the lives of millions with their lies, propose to police the web and verify the truth.&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><b>October 3, 2016</b>&nbsp;(<a href="http://journal-neo.org/2016/10/02/facebook-twitter-western-media-attempt-to-reassert-monopoly-over-truth/">Ulson Gunnar - NEO</a>) - In a surreal and stunning example of 21st century propaganda and censorship, Google has cobbled together a coalition it is calling "First Draft" to tackle what it calls&nbsp;<i>"misinformation online."&nbsp;</i><br /><i><br /></i><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-sG96s2aryew/V-f1lZWBq-I/AAAAAAAAOWw/UAdKkmIdkQMiXIQWXvouGj95zUdpL4QJgCLcB/s1600/logos-v12-1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-sG96s2aryew/V-f1lZWBq-I/AAAAAAAAOWw/UAdKkmIdkQMiXIQWXvouGj95zUdpL4QJgCLcB/s640/logos-v12-1.png" width="592" /></a></div><i><br /></i>First Draft's "founding partners" include News Corporation's (parent company of Fox News) Storyful and NATO think tank Atlantic Council's "Bellingcat" blog, headed by&nbsp;<a href="http://journal-neo.org/2015/08/17/who-is-the-wests-lead-mh17-investigator/">formally unemployed social worker Eliot Higgins</a>&nbsp;who now fashions himself as a weapons expert and geopolitical analyst despite no formal training, practical real-world experience or track record of honest, unbiased reporting. In fact, between News Corporation and Bellingcat alone, Google's First Draft appears to be itself a paragon of, and nexus for&nbsp;<i>"misinformation online."&nbsp;</i><br /><i><br /></i><b></b><a name='more'></a><b>Google's Glaring Conflicts of Interest&nbsp;</b><br /><br />Google too, having for years now worked closely&nbsp;<a href="http://journal-neo.org/2016/04/30/the-lingering-danger-of-google-facebook/">with the US State Department</a>, faces its own conflicts of interest in&nbsp;<i>"social newsgathering and verification."&nbsp;</i>In fact, Google has admittedly been involved in engineering intentional deceptions aimed specifically to skew public perception, including&nbsp;<a href="http://journal-neo.org/2016/08/05/clinton-campaigners-use-pokemon-go-to-literally-lure-voters/">doctoring its maps and Google Earth in real-time</a>&nbsp;amid conflicts in favor of US-backed militant groups and through the development of applications designed to psychologically target the Syrian government into capitulating before US-backed militant groups.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-9VdlD1exec4/V-f4f2IK-nI/AAAAAAAAOW8/hewAIejLn3Mmjf03h3sbri2_io6u_PE9wCLcB/s1600/hillary-clinton-at-google-1406029179.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="326" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-9VdlD1exec4/V-f4f2IK-nI/AAAAAAAAOW8/hewAIejLn3Mmjf03h3sbri2_io6u_PE9wCLcB/s640/hillary-clinton-at-google-1406029179.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br />The UK Independent in its article, "<a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/google-syria-rebels-defection-hillary-clinton-emails-wikileaks-a6946121.html">Google planned to help Syrian rebels bring down Assad regime, leaked Hillary Clinton emails claim</a>," would report that:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>An interactive tool created by Google was designed to encourage Syrian rebels and help bring down the Assad regime, Hillary Clinton's leaked emails have reportedly revealed.</i><i><br /></i><i><br /></i><i>By tracking and mapping defections within the Syrian leadership, it was reportedly designed to encourage more people to defect and 'give confidence' to the rebel opposition.</i></blockquote>The article would continue:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>The email detailing Google's defection tracker purportedly came from Jared Cohen, a Clinton advisor until 2010 and now-President of Jigsaw, formerly known as Google Ideas, the company's New York-based policy think tank.</i><i><br /></i><i><br /></i><i>In a July 2012 email to members of Clinton's team, which the WikiLeaks release alleges was later forwarded to the Secretary of State herself, Cohen reportedly said: “My team is planning to launch a tool on Sunday that will publicly track and map the defections in Syria and which parts of the government they are coming from.”</i></blockquote>Cohen would conclude:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>“Our logic behind this is that while many people are tracking the atrocities, nobody is visually representing and mapping the defections, which we believe are important in encouraging more to defect and giving confidence to the opposition.”</i></blockquote>Can Google then be relied upon to sort out&nbsp;<i>"misinformation online"</i>&nbsp;if it itself is directly involved in manipulating public perception to achieve US foreign policy objectives? To impartial observers, the answer is clearly&nbsp;<i>"no."</i><br /><br />First Draft would publish on its website a post titled, "<a href="https://firstdraftnews.com/social-networks-unite-global-newsrooms-take-action-misinformation-online/">Social networks unite with global newsrooms to take action against misinformation online</a>," adding further details behind the alleged rationale of the coalition. It would state:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>Today, news breaks online. Today, the first images to emerge from a breaking news event have been captured by an eyewitness. Today, injustices that may never have been reported become global news stories because a bystander reached for their smartphone. Today, malicious hoaxes and fake news reports are published in increasingly convincing and sophisticated ways.&nbsp;</i><i><br /></i><i><br /></i><i>We live in a time when trust and truth are issues that all newsrooms, and increasingly the social platforms themselves, are facing. In July, the Guardian’s Editor-in-Chief Katharine Viner wrote about the ways technology is disrupting the truth, explaining “in the news feed on your phone, all stories look the same – whether they come from a credible source or not.” Filtering out false information can be hard. Even if news organisations only share fact-checked and verified stories, everyone is a publisher and a potential source.</i></blockquote>The members that constitute the First Draft coalition, however, have enjoyed an uncontested monopoly for decades in determining just what the "truth" actually is, as well as a monopoly over propagating things the global public now know for a fact were "untruths." Again, we see another case of the proverbial fox guarding the hen house.<br /><b><br />The Liars Who Lied About WMDs in Iraq Will Protect Us from Liars Online?&nbsp;</b><br /><br />Indeed, many of the organizations that constitute First Draft's coalition played a pivotal role in perhaps the most destructive and costly lie of the 21st century (to date), that involving alleged "weapons of mass destruction" or "WMDs" in Iraq, serving as the pretext for the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-_RdxIiIjKt8/V-f4wHOB35I/AAAAAAAAOXA/VlTgDIkpcHQaypkbufSs2U7ePwCGzEyRQCLcB/s1600/US_Navy_030402-N-5362A-004_U.S._Army_Sgt._Mark_Phiffer_stands_guard_duty_near_a_burning_oil_well_in_the_Rumaylah_Oil_Fields_in_Southern_Iraq.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="420" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-_RdxIiIjKt8/V-f4wHOB35I/AAAAAAAAOXA/VlTgDIkpcHQaypkbufSs2U7ePwCGzEyRQCLcB/s640/US_Navy_030402-N-5362A-004_U.S._Army_Sgt._Mark_Phiffer_stands_guard_duty_near_a_burning_oil_well_in_the_Rumaylah_Oil_Fields_in_Southern_Iraq.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br />According to some estimates, up to a million perished in the initial invasion and subsequent occupation. More conservative estimates are still in the hundreds of thousands.<br /><br />Undoubtedly, the invasion, justified by lies propagated across the entirety of US and European media, helped trigger a predictable chain of catastrophes that have left the Middle East to this day in conflict and ruination. These same US and European media organizations, the same ones now signing their names to First Draft, also helped justify the continued presence of US troops in Iraq for years after the invasion, up to and including today.<br /><br />And the same names signed on to First Draft are also the same names who helped sell the disastrous intervention in Libya and who are now attempting to sell yet another direct Western military intervention in Syria.<br /><br />And it is perhaps the lack of success these same names are having in selling this most recent potential intervention in Syria that has precipitated First Draft's creation in the first place.<br /><br />There is a burgeoning alternative media composed of individual independent journalists, analysts and commentators both biased and impartial, both professional and amateur, competing directly with and overcoming the West's longstanding monopoly over international public perception. There is also the emergence of professional and competitive national media organizations across the developing world who are taking increasingly large shares of both the West's media monopoly and its monopoly over the public's trust.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-pnbtchplWzQ/V-f5GcFSnPI/AAAAAAAAOXE/VRjrs5GrQE8-f0JGL5mAp1KfNSssuKTzwCLcB/s1600/1027852610.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="346" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-pnbtchplWzQ/V-f5GcFSnPI/AAAAAAAAOXE/VRjrs5GrQE8-f0JGL5mAp1KfNSssuKTzwCLcB/s640/1027852610.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br />It is clear that First Draft has no intention of protecting the truth as none among its membership have done so until now individually, but rather in collectively protecting what the special interests behind these organizations want the global public to believe is the truth. First Draft is a desperate measure taken by Western special interests to reassert the West's dominance over global public perception by leveraging the widely used social media platforms it controls, including Facebook and Twitter, as well as IT giant Google and its large range of services and applications.<br /><br />In the end, all that First Draft is likely to accomplish is convincing the developing world of the necessity of creating domestic alternatives to Facebook, Google and Twitter, as well as to continue expanding their own domestic media organizations to better represent their respective national interests upon the global stage and to dilute the dangerous and destructive media monopoly the West has enjoyed and abused for decades.<br /><br />Until the members of First Draft can cite a lie told by their competitors that is as destructive and as costly as their own lies preceding and underpinning the invasion and occupation of Iraq or the more recent destruction of Libya, their efforts appear more as a means of further deflecting away from the truth, not defending it.<br /><br />&nbsp;<i style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.4px; line-height: 18.48px;">Ulson Gunnar, a New York-based geopolitical analyst and writer especially for the online magazine “<a href="http://journal-neo.org/" style="color: #6fa8dc; text-decoration: none;">New Eastern Outlook</a>”.</i></div>http://localorg.blogspot.com/2016/10/facebook-twitter-western-media-attempt.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Land Destroyer)tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7079343630025538378.post-3551084218956097696Fri, 16 Sep 2016 14:30:00 +00002016-09-16T07:30:02.636-07:00ITSciTechFacebook, Internet.org, and the End of Net Neutrality <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div class="tr_bq"><b>September 16, 2016</b>&nbsp;(<a href="http://journal-neo.org/2016/09/16/facebook-internet-org-and-the-end-of-net-neutrality/">Tony Cartalucci - NEO</a>) - American-based aerospace company SpaceX is one of the few Western enterprises pursuing a greater purpose in a nation otherwise obsessed with power and profit. When its rocket was recently lost on the launch pad amidst an anomaly it took with it a satellite to be used by Facebook, an example of the latter.&nbsp;</div><div class="tr_bq"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-EQBZoLBtJ4M/V8vmT6oaxYI/AAAAAAAAOPc/ZZ5NznhgGccr_Q__m-7-lBVnHoBIBsEyACLcB/s1600/fqvi1nkhs6z7zpgmvcbg.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="344" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-EQBZoLBtJ4M/V8vmT6oaxYI/AAAAAAAAOPc/ZZ5NznhgGccr_Q__m-7-lBVnHoBIBsEyACLcB/s640/fqvi1nkhs6z7zpgmvcbg.png" width="640" /></a></div><div class="tr_bq"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="tr_bq">The Guardian in an article titled, "<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/sep/01/mark-zuckerberg-spacex-explosion-africa-internet">SpaceX rocket explosion: Mark Zuckerberg laments loss of Internet.org satellite</a>," would report:&nbsp;</div><blockquote><i>Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg struck a bitter tone in his response to the explosion of the SpaceX rocket carrying a satellite intended for use on his Internet.org project in Africa.&nbsp;</i><i><br /></i><i><br /></i><i>Writing on his Facebook page, Zuckerberg said: “As I’m here in Africa, I’m deeply disappointed to hear that SpaceX’s launch failure destroyed our satellite that would have provided connectivity to so many entrepreneurs and everyone else across the continent.”</i></blockquote>However, while technically Facebook's Internet.org would provide "connectivity" to people across the continent, it would not be providing them with access to the actual Internet.<br /><br />Instead, it is Facebook's version of the Internet, where the concept of net neutrality - the principle that Internet service providers should enable access to all content and applications regardless of the source, and without favoring or blocking particular products or websites -&nbsp;does not exist.<br /><br /><br /><a name='more'></a>On Facebook's version of the Internet, only those willing to pay large sums of money can have access to audiences while others who do not pay, no matter how popular or meaningful their message may be, are essentially silenced. This is already a reality across Facebook's social network itself, and this network is one of several "Free Basics" offered on Facebook's Internet.org.<br /><br /><b>Internet.org by Facebook Aims to Control the World, Not "Connect" It&nbsp;</b><br /><br />A visit to&nbsp;<a href="https://info.internet.org/en/">Facebook's Internet.org</a>&nbsp;reveals meaningless slogans and images of smiling brown people.<br /><br />Looking past the superficiality at what Internet.org truly represents, it is clear that it is an attempt to takeover and monopolize the telecom industry and in particular, the entire Internet across the developing world. Not only does Facebook's "Free Basics" limit users to information highly controlled by Western corporate-financier special interests and Facebook's own&nbsp;<a href="http://journal-neo.org/2014/12/24/facebook-colonialism-2-0/">net neutrality-usurping algorithms</a>, but because the infrastructure employs methods including space-based satellites, the governments and communities exposed to this upturned version of the Internet have no say or control over it.<br /><br /><br /><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-nYKDaxy9UZk/V8vlxDIRLoI/AAAAAAAAOPY/OMe8WP03uBsNrgvXzy8LUahsFNwobb5DgCLcB/s1600/3600.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="384" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-nYKDaxy9UZk/V8vlxDIRLoI/AAAAAAAAOPY/OMe8WP03uBsNrgvXzy8LUahsFNwobb5DgCLcB/s640/3600.jpg" width="640" /></a><br /><br />So obvious is this, that even before Facebook has completed its plans, nations are already fighting back.<br /><br />In India, net neutrality activists succeeded in getting the invasive, manipulative, and monopolizing service banned from the country. The Guardian's article, "<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/08/india-facebook-free-basics-net-neutrality-row">India deals blow to Facebook in people-powered 'net neutrality' row</a>," would report:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>Facebook has lost the right to offer its free mobile internet service in India after the country’s telecoms regulator ruled in favour of net neutrality, marking the end of an intense and very public 11-month national debate.&nbsp;</i><i><br /></i><i><br /></i><i>The new regulations published by India’s Telecom Regulatory Authority (TRAI) ban differential pricing for data services, and make it easier for smaller firms to compete with established companies including Facebook.</i></blockquote>Facebook's response was as unsurprising as it was dishonest, claiming:<br /><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>Our goal with Free Basics is to bring more people online with an open, non-exclusive and free platform. While disappointed with the outcome, we will continue our efforts to eliminate barriers and give the unconnected an easier path to the internet and the opportunities it brings.</i></blockquote>In reality, in order to eliminate barriers and connect people, the people themselves must acquire the skills and resources necessary to create their own infrastructure, companies to maintain it, and the ability to create their own content to transmit over it - the very embodiment of both the Internet itself and the underlying hope proponents of net neutrality hold for the Internet. The people using the Internet in their nation should be the primary benefactors of it - not just in terms of having access to useful information, but the ability to earn a living by maintaining its infrastructure.<br /><br />In addition to Facebook's ability to penetrate and monopolize any given developing nation's telecom industry,&nbsp;<a href="http://journal-neo.org/2016/04/30/the-lingering-danger-of-google-facebook/">considering Facebook's ties to the US State Department and its &nbsp;role in facilitating regime change</a>&nbsp;and even destructive, violent campaigns of armed subversion, it is very likely Facebook's monopoly would make it that much easier to control and manipulate information space in any given developing nation during a Western-engineered crisis.<br /><br />This may explain why legitimate nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in India stood up to Facebook's attempt to undermine net neutrality, but nations where NGOs are dominated by US State Department and Open Society funding like Thailand and the Philippines, Facebook's Internet.org has gone unopposed.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0IBkbq1mkJk/V8vm_aQitCI/AAAAAAAAOPg/IZSErJ0J6_89QGGAzkg6Cd6doaFILoIbACLcB/s1600/851f6000-b5cf-453a-9f23-f0144c93b50a.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0IBkbq1mkJk/V8vm_aQitCI/AAAAAAAAOPg/IZSErJ0J6_89QGGAzkg6Cd6doaFILoIbACLcB/s640/851f6000-b5cf-453a-9f23-f0144c93b50a.jpeg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px; text-align: left;"><i><b>Image</b>: "Activists" complain about Thailand's alleged "single gateway" plan to control domestic Internet infrastructure, while Facebook attempts to construct a global "single gateway" it controls, completely unopposed by these same groups - groups generally funded by the US State Department and Open Society, two partners Facebook has worked with in the past and groups that have themselves taken part in training assisted or sponsored by Facebook. .&nbsp;</i></td></tr></tbody></table><br />Telecom and information technology, like food, water, energy, and a standing army, are essential building blocks for national security and prosperity. Handing the responsibility of any of these over to either a foreign nation or a foreign corporation - or both - is the relinquishing of one's sovereignty and the compromising of one's national security.<br /><br />Nations and their people must develop their own Internet infrastructure. For Mark Zuckerberg and his government-connected corporation Facebook to presume they are the sole solution to "connecting the world" is but a modern-day version of "The White Man's Burden" - those nations subjected to it subordinated to this domineering arrogance and the self-serving schemes that underpin it.<br /><br />Facebook's Internet.org is a wake-up call for developing nations to stand up and invest in modern day essential infrastructure - including domestic versions of social networks like Facebook - to ensure they are as safe in the field of information as their conventional armies keep them on the field of battle.<br /><br /><i style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, tahoma, helvetica, freesans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.4px; line-height: 21.56px;"><span style="color: #444444;">Tony Cartalucci, Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine<a href="http://journal-neo.org/" style="color: #444444; text-decoration: none;">“</a><a href="http://journal-neo.org/" style="color: #444444; text-decoration: none;">New Eastern Outlook”</a>.</span></i></div>http://localorg.blogspot.com/2016/09/facebook-internetorg-and-end-of-net.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Land Destroyer)tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7079343630025538378.post-2642259207539544866Tue, 06 Sep 2016 16:34:00 +00002016-09-06T09:34:34.888-07:00alternative economyExploring Bitcoin and the Concept of Cryptocurrency <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><b>September 6, 2016</b> (LocalOrg) - Since the beginning of human civilization, money has taken one form or another. In modern times, currency has been effectively monopolized by financial institutions around the world. But with technology, is it possible to decentralize currency and put the power back into the hands of local communities?<br /><br />James Corbett explores this issue with&nbsp;Ken Shishido of the Tokyo Bitcoin Meetup Group.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Q1B0BRoJRkM" width="560"></iframe> <br /><div style="text-align: left;">Check out more of James Corbett's work at <a href="https://www.corbettreport.com/">CorbettReport.com</a>.&nbsp;</div></div></div>http://localorg.blogspot.com/2016/09/exploring-bitcoin-and-concept-of.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Land Destroyer)tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7079343630025538378.post-5045315953301715530Thu, 04 Feb 2016 22:00:00 +00002016-02-04T14:00:13.895-08:00biotechHealthGeneticsLiz Parrish - Bioviva - Ending Ageing through Gene Therapy<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><b>February 5, 2016</b> (LocalOrg) - Agree or disagree with her methods, Liz Parrish and her company, Bioviva are taking gene therapy into their own hands in an attempt to circumvent the corrupt pharmaceutical monopolies, their representatives in the media and government, and shift the paradigm toward a more decentralized means of research and development. <br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/iO6KDac8g_E" width="560"></iframe></div></div>http://localorg.blogspot.com/2016/02/liz-parrish-bioviva-ending-ageing.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Land Destroyer)tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7079343630025538378.post-952131555584857461Sun, 03 Jan 2016 11:20:00 +00002016-01-03T03:20:16.776-08:00agricultureorganicFarmer Shares Tips For Getting Into Small-Scale Organic Farming<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><b>January 3, 2016 </b>(<a href="http://www.wpr.org/farmer-shares-tips-getting-small-scale-organic-farming">Wisconsin Public Radio</a>) -&nbsp;A farmer and author of a book about running a small-scale organic farming, said he has has found a way to make a good living on a one and a half acre organic farm.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-kXUkBAiJANM/VokD4LdOKNI/AAAAAAAAMl4/cGzAQC4bkto/s1600/ak-18.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="424" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-kXUkBAiJANM/VokD4LdOKNI/AAAAAAAAMl4/cGzAQC4bkto/s640/ak-18.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br />Jean-Martin Fortier, author of "The Market Gardener: A Successful Grower's Handbook for Small-scale Organic Farming," said that no one really believes him when he says he does it without a conventional tractor.<br /><br />To encourage others who might have thought of this type of farming, he shared a few tips on his success:<br /><br /><b>Raised beds</b><br /><br />Fortier’s farm consists of 180 permanent raised beds. The beds are 100-feet long, 4 to 5 inch mounds of soil without a container around them. <br /><br />"After every two seasons, they tend to settle down so we need to re-raise them again," Fortier said. "With shovels or with the rotary plow, a tool that takes the dirt from the aisle and shoots it on to the bed like a shovel would do."<br /><br /><b><a href="http://www.wpr.org/farmer-shares-tips-getting-small-scale-organic-farming"><i>Continue reading at Wisconsin Public Radio...&nbsp;</i></a></b></div>http://localorg.blogspot.com/2016/01/farmer-shares-tips-for-getting-into.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Land Destroyer)tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7079343630025538378.post-1777508309253253832Thu, 12 Nov 2015 11:02:00 +00002015-11-12T03:02:25.053-08:00biotechdiyBioHealthGeneticsBig-Pharma Seeks Monopoly Over Life-Changing Therapy <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><span style="font-size: large;">By dangling life-changing cures over people's heads for cartoonish figures of "1 million dollars," pharmaceutical corporations prove when they see sick, desperate, dying people, all they see is dollar signs...&nbsp;</span><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><b>November 12, 2015</b>&nbsp;(Tony Cartalucci - LocalOrg) - Gene therapy is a game changer. It is not a treatment for diseases. It is a cure.<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-hBBgDrtHcI0/VkRuRwBOjkI/AAAAAAAAMSc/Bitkvx4LKSA/s1600/gene_therapy1330813550942.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="276" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-hBBgDrtHcI0/VkRuRwBOjkI/AAAAAAAAMSc/Bitkvx4LKSA/s640/gene_therapy1330813550942.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px; text-align: left;"><i><b>Image</b>: Gene therapy works by reprogramming an ordinary virus to delivery modified genes to human cells. Once introduced, the modified genes are replicated by natural cell division. Missing or defective genes, over time, can be replaced by repaired genes, reprogramming the immune system to eradicate otherwise incurable diseases, or creating function in defective systems, curing blindness, deafness, diabetes, and even effects owed to aging.&nbsp;</i></td></tr></tbody></table><br />It is a cure for cancer, genetic defects, blindness, deafness, diabetes, even potentially aging.<br /><br />It has already proven effective in clinical trials,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/resource-guide-penn-researchers-use-bodys-immune-system-target-leukemia/">curing people of leukemia who were otherwise certain to die</a>, giving people their sight back, and already, there is one therapy approved for use in the European Union with several others approved in China.<br /><br />The most remarkable aspect of gene therapy is that it overwrites your DNA once, then your cells replicate that new DNA each time they divide. In essence, the cure becomes a permanent part of you. One shot, one cure, for life, or close to it.<br /><br /><b>Why Haven't We Heard More About This?&nbsp;</b><br /><br />As remarkable and as promising as gene therapy is, it poses an immense threat to the established healthcare industry. A shot in clinical trials using experimental equipment that costs only 20,000 USD to produce that cures leukemia, if brought into mainstream medicine would be cheaper still, and undercut existing and ineffective"treatments" that can reach costs in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.<br /><br />Gene therapy, then, is essentially a disruptive technology that brings various healthcare rackets to an abrupt halt along with all the vast wealth and unwarranted power and influence big-pharma has enjoyed over the decades.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-BtcSpn0zG1A/VkRq71mPCiI/AAAAAAAAMSQ/oxpcOk3JV64/s1600/OPENER_health-Penn-Medicine-Team-apr14_sd.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="256" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-BtcSpn0zG1A/VkRq71mPCiI/AAAAAAAAMSQ/oxpcOk3JV64/s640/OPENER_health-Penn-Medicine-Team-apr14_sd.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px; text-align: left;"><i><b>Image</b>: Dr. Carl June (center) led a team that developed a breakthrough gene therapy that effectively reprograms the immune system to hunt and kill leukemia cancer cells. Most of the patients, otherwise sure to die from their cancer, have gone into permanent remission.&nbsp;</i></td></tr></tbody></table><br />How can big-pharma continue on with its monopolies, wealth, and influence by curing everyone with one shot that costs almost nothing to make?<br /><br />Their strategy is two-fold. First, they have intentionally dragged their feet for as long as possible until they can figure this problem out, letting people die of now curable diseases simply because they want to protect their existing business models and bottom lines.<br /><br />Second, they have begun to mold public opinion through intense lobbying across the media and medical journals, ignoring the actual costs involved in producing the therapies, and instead cashing in on what they think it is worth to people, or in other words, dangling cures for crippling, deadly diseases over dying and/or desperate people's heads,&nbsp;<a href="http://localorg.blogspot.com/2015/03/op-ed-big-pharma-gene-therapy.html">and seeing how much they are willing to pay for them</a>.<br /><br /><br /><a name='more'></a>The Washington Post, in its article, "<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/gene-therapies-offer-dramatic-promise-but-shocking-costs/2015/11/11/01f11cf0-824b-11e5-9afb-0c971f713d0c_story.html">Gene therapies offer dramatic promise but shocking costs</a>," writes (emphasis added):<br /><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>A gene therapy approved in Europe in 2012 costs close to $1 million, and prices are expected to follow suit in the United States. The therapies in the pipeline are mostly for rare genetic diseases: sickle cell, hemophilia or immune deficiency.&nbsp;<b>Their likely high prices stem from the expected value;</b>&nbsp;unlike drugs that a person takes regularly, gene therapies are designed to be given once and have lasting effects.</i></blockquote>&nbsp;The Washington Post continues by reporting (emphasis added):<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>But everyone involved anticipates the potential backlash against a seven-figure price tag, which is leading to radical proposals. Instead of paying for a treatment all at once, insurers and patients could make installment payments as long as the therapy works, similar to a mortgage on a house. Some researchers are adding up the cost of the traditional treatments that a patient will be able to avoid each year to determine a price that, although high, could lead to savings for the health-care system.&nbsp;</i><i><br /></i><i><br /></i><i><b>To Corona [a young woman whose eyesight has been&nbsp;improved&nbsp;by gene therapy], the gift of vision&nbsp;is something approaching a miracle. But how much is that miracle worth in dollars?</b></i></blockquote><br />Finally, the Washington Post concludes by saying:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>Corona, who excitedly woke up her family in the middle of the night when she read about the possibility of gene therapy years ago, didn’t have to pay for her treatment, because she was part of a clinical trial.&nbsp;</i><i><br /></i><i><br /></i><i>But she said her family would have found a way to get her the therapy if it had already been on the market, even if it meant battling an insurance company or taking out a loan. After all, she said, it’s not only about seeing better. She now feels like a happier, more confident person. That part feels priceless.</i></blockquote>There seems to be nothing worse than exploiting human suffering, and the Washington Post has described perhaps the most blatant case-study of just such exploitation. It does not cost millions of dollars to prepare one of these therapies. Research may be costly, but is generally funded by taxpayers' money through government grants to research laboratories. With the potential gene therapy offers it is likely the public could be convinced to invest even more public money into the development of such therapies.<br /><br />Instead, what is happening, is public-funded research is then being handed over to corporations to commercialize these therapies. These corporations seek to minimize investments, and maximize profits and a complicit government is letting them do just that.<br /><br />In the case of leukemia-beating therapies developed by Pennsylvania University,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.uphs.upenn.edu/news/News_Releases/2012/08/novartis/">big-pharma giant Novartis swooped in only after clinical trials proved an astounding success</a>. Likely the most pressing issue holding back this revolutionary cure from saving more lives in the immediate future is not medical or technical, but rather how best to cash in on a literal cure for cancer. A&nbsp;<a href="http://articles.philly.com/2015-04-08/news/60907212_1_penn-and-novartis-carl-june-immunotherapy">recent patent dispute</a>&nbsp;has already delayed research that literally could make the difference between life and death.<br /><br /><b>An Alternative Reality &nbsp;</b><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>Imagine greater amounts of public funding going into the research and development of gene therapy. Imagine cures for diseases that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars instead of tens of thousands of dollars or a ridiculous sum of 1 million dollars. And imagine open source journals publishing the results and findings as the field of gene therapy expands so other institutions both in the United States, and around the world could benefit from this revolutionary breakthrough.<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-P1l4lHzZHp4/VkRvZ7dPbpI/AAAAAAAAMSk/2GXz89tjHrk/s1600/Emily-Whitehead.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="360" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-P1l4lHzZHp4/VkRvZ7dPbpI/AAAAAAAAMSk/2GXz89tjHrk/s640/Emily-Whitehead.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px; text-align: left;"><i><b>Images</b>: Emily Whitehead today (left) after receiving revolutionary gene therapy developed by Pennsylvania University, and Emily Whitehead beforehand (right) at the end of failed conventional chemotherapy for her leukemia. Had she not received gene therapy as part of a clinical trial, she surely would not be alive today. Big-pharma believes only those willing to pay heavily for such "miracles" deserve to benefit from them.&nbsp;</i></td></tr></tbody></table><br />Indeed, gene therapy can not only save public health programs money, they can transform them entirely. Imagine needing but a single shot to permanently cure your condition, instead of spending a lifetime seeing doctors, specialists, pharmacists, and insurance agents treating a persistent disease or condition. Image the burden that would be lifted off of local clinics, hospitals, and the public funds that could then be diverted elsewhere.<br /><br />We stand at the precipice of conquering human health by mastering it at the genetic level. It would be a step of historic proportions not unlike the industrial revolution, the information age, or the discovery of DNA itself. Unfortunately, stakeholders who have made immense fortunes and who have built entire empires on exploiting human sickness and all the desperation associated with potentially losing one's life or the life of a loved one, stand in the way.<br /><br />Not only are they standing in the way, they have begun to clearly draw a line publicly, defining just how this revolution will be harnessed to their benefit and at the expense of literally everyone else.<br /><br /><b>Fighting Back</b><br /><br />Wielding the power of gene therapy requires an understanding of biotechnology, the ability to use the tools and techniques of biotechnology in a properly equipped laboratory, with competent technicians, doctors, and researchers. Until recently, all of this required huge sums of financial support and the backing of the state, institutions, and/or large, well-established corporations.<br /><br />Today, however, the cost for much of the equipment used in biotechnology has come tumbling down. Open source tools and techniques are finding their way onto the Internet, and laboratories built by and for communities have begun springing up around the globe. Called DIYbio labs or community labs, they have so far focused on simpler goals, such as genetically testing food, re-engineering bacteria, or simply developing better versions of existing open source lab equipment, software, and protocols.<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0kEE9KYnjxE/VkRp_QY76wI/AAAAAAAAMSI/qTEsjOVm80s/s1600/maxresdefault.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="360" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0kEE9KYnjxE/VkRp_QY76wI/AAAAAAAAMSI/qTEsjOVm80s/s640/maxresdefault.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px; text-align: left;"><i><b>Image</b>: Liz Parrish has become the first of what is likely to be many, who has short-circuited big-pharma's attempted monopoly over gene &nbsp;therapy by developing and testing on herself two potential breakthroughs.&nbsp;</i></td></tr></tbody></table><br />A smaller and lesser known sub-culture known as "grinders," focus on DIYbio applied to human health. Many of the experiments they conduct are conducted on they themselves. The most extreme and relevant example of this involved&nbsp;Elizabeth Parrish, a 44-year-old CEO of the biotech startup BioViva, who conducted tests with two different experimental gene therapies on herself.<br /><br />Whether Parrish's experiments prove a success or not is irrelevant. According to MIT's Technology Review in an article titled, "<a href="http://www.technologyreview.com/news/542371/a-tale-of-do-it-yourself-gene-therapy/">A Tale of Do-It-Yourself Gene Therapy</a>," the actual process of preparing a therapy is not particularly complicated and can be done in any properly outfitted lab.<br /><br />MIT Technology Review states specifically (emphasis added):<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>Another prominent science advisor listed by BioViva is Harvard Medical School genomics expert George Church, who includes BioViva in a list on his website of around 100 companies he collaborates with. Church said last week he was also trying to learn what exactly had occurred in Latin America. “I think it is real,” he said in an interview. “There were some indications it might happen. Companies in stealth mode can do anything they want.”&nbsp;</i><i><br /></i><i><br /></i><i>Church says he didn’t agree with dodging regulators and added that BioViva appears to be “a one-person show.”&nbsp;<b>But he says he found Parrish’s claims plausible. A student in his lab, he says, could prepare a genetic treatment suitable for experiments in animals in a matter of days.</b></i></blockquote><br />If that is so, Parrish is likely only the first of many soon to follow. Faced with either a lifetime in debt to big-pharma, or even the prospect of dying from a curable condition big-pharma simply refuses to provide the cure for because of financial considerations, a growing number of people will turn to "labs" that could prepare genetic treatments at drastically reduced costs and with minimum or nonexistent barriers to accessibility.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ekXpgWgkdgI/VkRwi7aGdUI/AAAAAAAAMSs/Irj5UrVoM0o/s1600/biosafe-level-one-100046745-orig.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="424" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ekXpgWgkdgI/VkRwi7aGdUI/AAAAAAAAMSs/Irj5UrVoM0o/s640/biosafe-level-one-100046745-orig.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px; text-align: left;"><i><b>Image</b>: Increasingly common around the world are DIYbio labs, or community labs where enthusiasts have begun to harness the power of biotechnology for their community's own benefit. The expansion of these local institutions stands to challenge the corrupt, inhuman monopolies erected by big-pharmaceuticals, and liberate humanity from what is for all intents and purposes a growing scientific and medical dictatorship. &nbsp;</i></td></tr></tbody></table>Dangerous? Yes. But if you are dying from cancer, and as big-pharma itself has pointed out, you're likely to do anything - whether it is putting yourself in debt to big-pharma for a million dollars, or rolling the dice with a treatment drummed up in an underground biopunk lab.<br /><br />As the capabilities of DIYbio labs grow in general, it will become increasingly possible for dedicated teams of citizen scientists and activists to reverse engineer existing therapies, reproduce them, and put them online in a biological version of existing peer-to-peer file sharing networks. Independent research and development toward human health applications and even gene therapy itself will also become increasing possible.<br /><br />Eventually, because of big-pharma's shortsighted greed, it will be displaced entirely by this growing network of localized medicine, all because it decided to turn this historic corner as plunderers instead of as enlightened leaders.<br /><br />For average people out there interested in getting involved, simply use your favorite Internet search engine, type in "<a href="http://diybio.org/local/">DIYbio</a>" and the city you live in or near, and start attending meetings, workshops, and participating in projects today. All great journeys initially start with single steps in more or less familiar surroundings, but collectively lead to something far more significant.<br /><div><br /></div></div>http://localorg.blogspot.com/2015/11/big-pharma-seeks-monopoly-over-life.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Land Destroyer)tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7079343630025538378.post-2642558359818493708Sat, 06 Jun 2015 14:42:00 +00002015-06-06T07:42:46.106-07:00diyBioHealthGeneticsThe Dangers of Human Gene Editing<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">June 6, 2015</b><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">&nbsp;(</span><a href="http://journal-neo.org/2015/06/05/the-dangers-of-human-gene-editing/" style="background-color: white; color: #6fa8dc; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px; text-decoration: none;">Ulson Gunnar - NEO</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">) - It is often said that if it can be imagined, it will inevitably be done. And such a sentiment could not be any truer in terms of applying genetic engineering and synthetic biology to the genomes of our planet's organisms including humans themselves.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><br /><div class="separator" style="background-color: white; clear: both; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-pZSih6mAT-U/VVWQZ6qREDI/AAAAAAAALU0/YUrwcli7uMo/s1600/NEO-COLLAGE-43.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="color: #6fa8dc; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-decoration: none;"><img border="0" height="466" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-pZSih6mAT-U/VVWQZ6qREDI/AAAAAAAALU0/YUrwcli7uMo/s640/NEO-COLLAGE-43.jpg" style="-webkit-box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.0980392) 1px 1px 5px; background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 1px solid rgb(238, 238, 238); box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.0980392) 1px 1px 5px; padding: 5px; position: relative;" width="640" /></a></div><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">While the process of synthesizing and arranging genetic code has many processes, perhaps none has been as promising as the&nbsp;CRISPR-Cas system. From laboratory experiments to emerging software used to create code genetically almost as easily as code for a computer, gene editing has never been easier, opening the door to never-before-possible applications.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">Perhaps no technology yet has been poised to change the world so profoundly. All life on Earth, every living organism, now stands the possibility of potentially being "edited" on the most basic genetic level, enhancing or degrading it, but forever changing it.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">Gene editing or "gene therapy" performed on children or adults changes the genetic makeup of targeted cells after which and upon dividing, impart this new genetic material on each subsequent new cell. This is why treatments for diseases using gene therapy often are successful with only a single shot. The "treatment" self-replicates perpetually within the patient's body. Everything from leukemia to congenial genetic defects have been overcome in clinical trials using this method.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">As far as science knows, these changes cannot be passed onto the offspring of patients. However, changing the genetic makeup of a human at their earliest stages of development can be passed on, spreading genetic changes made in labs onto the greater population.&nbsp;</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"></b><br /><a name='more'></a><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">The Biggest Threats: The Jab and Slow Kill</b><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">Talk of gene editing usually revolves around its use to treat diseases and produce super-crops and livestock to "save the world." But as history has shown us, any technology is but a double edged sword. Whatever good it is capable of, it is proportionally capable of just as much bad.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">The first and foremost danger of human gene editing in particular is its use in weaponized vaccines. Such fears are founded upon what was revealed by the United Nations during the apartheid government in South Africa where a government program named "Project Coast" actually endeavored to produce vaccines that were race-specific in hopes of sterilizing or killing off its black population.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="more" style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"></a><br /><div class="separator" style="background-color: white; clear: both; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-vmIwXCeCYzw/VVWQj7u2NuI/AAAAAAAALU8/EUFwKE40Zo8/s1600/bioWarfareZA.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; color: #6fa8dc; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-decoration: none;"><br /><img border="0" height="253" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-vmIwXCeCYzw/VVWQj7u2NuI/AAAAAAAALU8/EUFwKE40Zo8/s400/bioWarfareZA.jpg" style="-webkit-box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.0980392) 1px 1px 5px; background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 1px solid rgb(238, 238, 238); box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.0980392) 1px 1px 5px; padding: 5px; position: relative;" width="400" /></a></div><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">The United Nations in a report titled&nbsp;</span><a href="http://www.unidir.org/files/publications/pdfs/project-coast-apartheid-s-chemical-and-biological-warfare-programme-296.pdf" style="background-color: white; color: #6fa8dc; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px; text-decoration: none;"><i>Project Coast: Apartheid’s Chemical and Biological Warfare Programme</i></a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">&nbsp;would admit:</span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"><i>One example of this interaction involved anti-fertility work. According to documents from RRL [Roodeplaat Research Laboratories], the facility had a number of registered projects aimed at developing an anti-fertility vaccine. This was a personal project of the first managing director of RRL, Dr Daniel Goosen. Goosen, who had done research into embryo transplants, told the TRC that he and Basson had discussed the possibility of developing an anti-fertility vaccine which could be selectively administered—without the knowledge of the recipient. The intention, he said, was to administer it to black South African women without their knowledge.</i></blockquote><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">At the time, the technology to accomplish such a feat never materialized. Now it has.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">Another danger is "slow kill." This would be the process of using gene editing to affect individuals directly or through a genetically modified food supply subtly, infecting or killing off targeted demographic groups over a longer period of time. The advantage of this method would be the ambiguity surrounding what was causing upticks in "cancer" and other maladies brought on by degraded immune systems and overall health.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">And while some might be tempted to claim the dangers of this technology being used against populations remains solely in the realm of "Nazi eugenicists" and racist South African regimes, the truth of the matter is even Washington has penned policy papers advocating weapons deployed amid the "world of microbes."</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">Mentioned in the US Neo-Conservative Project for a New American Century's (PNAC) 2000 report titled&nbsp;</span><a href="http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf" style="background-color: white; color: #6fa8dc; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px; text-decoration: none;"><i>Rebuilding America's Defenses (.pdf)</i></a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">&nbsp;it stated:&nbsp;</span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"><i>The proliferation of ballistic and cruise missiles and long-range unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) will make it much easier to project military power around the globe. Munitions themselves will become increasingly accurate, while new methods of attack – electronic, “non-lethal,” biological – will be more widely available. (<a href="http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf" style="color: #6fa8dc; text-decoration: none;">p.71 of .pdf</a>)</i><i><br /></i><i>Although it may take several decade for the process of transformation to unfold, in time, the art of warfare on air, land, and sea will be vastly different than it is today, and “combat” likely will take place in new dimensions: in space, “cyber-space,” and perhaps the world of microbes. (<a href="http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf" style="color: #6fa8dc; text-decoration: none;">p.72 of .pdf</a>)</i></blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"><i>And advanced forms of biological warfare that can “target” specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool. (<a href="http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf" style="color: #6fa8dc; text-decoration: none;">p.72 of .pdf</a>)</i></blockquote><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">Biological warfare that can "target" specific genotypes is precisely what is now possible in the advent of improved gene editing. While many may suspect profit alone drives large pharmaceutical corporations to push vaccines on the global population, in reality, what it may also represent is an attempt by these very conspirators to create a well established globalized medium through which to administer their targeted bioweapons, yet another reason why the matter of human healthcare and biotechnology (and specifically vaccines) is a matter of not just business,&nbsp;</span><a href="http://journal-neo.org/2015/05/04/vaccines-and-national-security/" style="background-color: white; color: #6fa8dc; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px; text-decoration: none;">but of national security as well</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">. &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">Overwriting the Planet's Genetic Heritage</b><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">Recently, Chinese scientists have crossed what many Western commentators, scientists and others have claimed is an "ethical line" by applying gene editing to human embryos. Critics have condemned the move specifically because any human "edited" while at their embryonic stage would likely transfer those genetic changes to any offspring they had upon becoming an adult.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">Yet many of these critics have been vocal advocates for precisely the same use of biotech, though not for humans, but rather for our food supply. Genetically modified organisms (GMOs), particularly modified crops transfer their artificially altered genetic code to its next generation. Cross pollination has repeatedly contaminated the fields of farmers not using GMOs, creating an expanding controversy and multiple lawsuits and legal reviews.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">In reality, all genetic editing, especially when it alters the genetic material of subsequent generations, represents a potential threat to the genetic heritage of the entire planet with potential consequences we may still not fully understand. In a world where the "science is final" regarding humanity's impact on the planet's climate, demanding "urgent action" to stop or reverse it, the absence of a similar impetus behind stopping the contamination of our planet's genetic heritage seems suspiciously hypocritical if not utterly reckless and even intentional.&nbsp;</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">Of course, gene editing will be done, with or without the approval of governments and the people they govern. However, measures should be developed and put in place to preserve the natural genetic heritage of the planet, and such measures should be decentralized as much as possible.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><br /><div class="separator" style="background-color: white; clear: both; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Vqm8ytT2EG0/VVWQ9nUy1tI/AAAAAAAALVE/D2H1wKf0Xzc/s1600/28695_img___1350652280.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; color: #6fa8dc; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-decoration: none;"><img border="0" height="263" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Vqm8ytT2EG0/VVWQ9nUy1tI/AAAAAAAALVE/D2H1wKf0Xzc/s400/28695_img___1350652280.jpg" style="-webkit-box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.0980392) 1px 1px 5px; background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 1px solid rgb(238, 238, 238); box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.0980392) 1px 1px 5px; padding: 5px; position: relative;" width="400" /></a></div><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">The James Bond-esque "Svalbard Global Seed Vault" in the frigid climate of Norway represents a sort of "backup" for many of the planet's horticultural species, but is controlled by the very interests intentionally destroying the planet's genomes. It represents essentially a criminal gang preparing to sink the ship, but only after securing for themselves the only lifeboat available.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">More lifeboats must be made available and it will require the understanding of policymakers of this emerging technology and the threats it presents, along with national and local policies to hedge against these threats.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">The West Trapped in its Own Hypocrisy&nbsp;</b><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">Ironically, the West's own hypocrisy has tied its hands in condemning China's moves to recklessly alter the human genomes of embryos. Not only is the West's attitude toward GMOs in general now hurting their case against China, the prevailing attitude in the West that embryos are not even "human" is also critically hypocritical, regardless of how irrational, unscientific and unqualified (however very politically convenient) such an attitude is.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">To the West, unborn children are virtually "garbage" to be thrown away on a whim. So the Chinese might be forgiven for thinking it is perfectly ok to experiment recklessly upon them. In reality a human being's unique genetic code and the metabolic cellular activity that constitutes the beginning of its life... both of which perpetuate themselves uninterrupted until birth and continues on until death, natural or otherwise ... begins at conception. As such, experimenting on a human embryo may not superficially "feel" or "look" like human experimentation, but scientifically it is.&nbsp;</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">The West is quite right about condemning China for its experimentation on human embryos, however its confused self-serving hypocrisy has made this condemnation incoherent and unfortunately irrelevant.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">Regardless, those nations still adhering to a sense of both objective science and humanity can and must set a precedent based on the above described realities. They must recognize the threats and abuses this technology poses equally with its benefits. They must educate their populations to understand the difference between the two, and the importance of developing a national biotechnology initiative as a matter of both national security and progress. But above all, they must understand that biotechnology represents the next big revolution, after information technology, and begin building the necessary infrastructure to support it.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">Without doing so, nations will find themselves ill-prepared to either capitalize on its benefits or defend against its many and incredibly dangerous abuses.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">Weaponization, accidents and even the prospect of globalized corporations finding, then making inaccessible the cures to diseases and conditions affecting millions such as cancer, diabetes and heart disease are all threats we now face, whether we would like to admit it or not. One point the West correctly made upon its hand wringing over China's most recent and reckless leap forward, was that the matter of biotechnology's profound impact on the human genome and the genetic heritage of the entire planet is no longer the subject of a "future" scenario. It is a matter of present concern. &nbsp;&nbsp;</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><i style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 18.4799995422363px;">Ulson Gunnar, a New York-based geopolitical analyst and writer especially for the online magazine “<a href="http://journal-neo.org/" style="color: #6fa8dc; text-decoration: none;">New Eastern Outlook</a>”.</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">&nbsp;</span></div>http://localorg.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-dangers-of-human-gene-editing.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Land Destroyer)tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7079343630025538378.post-7549433664653483302Wed, 15 Apr 2015 07:36:00 +00002015-04-15T00:36:44.192-07:00ITSciTechThe Information War on a Whole New Level: Space<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><b>April 15, 2015</b>&nbsp;(<a href="http://journal-neo.org/2015/04/14/outernet-the-information-war-on-a-whole-new-level/">Ulson Gunnar - NEO</a>) - The information war can be quickly lost if one cannot get their assets onto the "battlefield." For the US, UK or Europe, the constant din of their propaganda spread across the planet via their impressive and immense media networks has recently run into a few snags.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-j8vRCDKMdwM/VSlkI2j_c-I/AAAAAAAALNo/E8VF8Tsthjo/s1600/_78183993_638c8c1d-31a0-47dc-b6ec-66e3fa496f38.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-j8vRCDKMdwM/VSlkI2j_c-I/AAAAAAAALNo/E8VF8Tsthjo/s1600/_78183993_638c8c1d-31a0-47dc-b6ec-66e3fa496f38.jpg" height="358" width="640" /></a></div><br /><br />In nations like Russia, China or Iran, ruling governments and local industry have begun creating their own Internets, their own alternatives to US-controlled social media platforms and search engines, and in some cases, even their own hardware to run it all on. They have also taken a cue from the US and decided to put in "kill switches" and censorship measures to prevent information from abroad being piped into their nation and disseminated among their populations.<br /><br />Or more accurate than saying "to prevent information from abroad," one could say, "propaganda from abroad."<br /><br />For instance, the US State Department's Voice of America network openly attempts to insert narratives favorable to US interests in targeted countries. So important does the US State Department see this mission, it has even attempted to construct independent communication networks by building their own towers and relay stations.<br /><br /><br /><a name='more'></a>The US State Department has also spent millions of dollars on developing an "Internet in a suitcase," or a means to create an Internet among activists even when the government of a nation targeted by the US for regime change shuts down the real Internet. Far from science fiction, the New York Times would even cover it in their article, "<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/world/12internet.html?_r=2&amp;pagewanted=all">U.S. Underwrites Internet Detour Around Censors</a>."<br /><br />But the problem the US State Department and the special interests that underwrite it, is that such solutions are easily overcome by other governments, and even non-state actors operating in the defense of their nation against US-backed sedition.<br /><br />In order to crowdsource such a project, and have it spread prolifically across the planet, it must be made to appear altruistic, unattached to the political subversion it is actually created for, and put into the hands of unwitting, well-intentioned hackers for the purpose of building it, refining it and perpetually updating it to adapt and overcome whatever challenges it faces.<br /><br /><b>Enter the "Outernet"&nbsp;</b><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-SDfJhu06sl4/VSlkOm3ubFI/AAAAAAAALNw/Gyos2Unw1QU/s1600/_78183991_5faa1848-f3e2-4451-a27a-3e41f82bae81.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-SDfJhu06sl4/VSlkOm3ubFI/AAAAAAAALNw/Gyos2Unw1QU/s1600/_78183991_5faa1848-f3e2-4451-a27a-3e41f82bae81.jpg" height="223" width="400" /></a></div>At first glance, the Outernet looks like an amazing social project by genuine people interested in empowering people with the vast amounts of free information available on the Internet. It is a satellite based broadcast, meaning it can reach anyone on Earth with a receiver. And while it talks about a "library in your pocket" and how having that information could change society, it also talks about the inability for sovereign governments to censor it. But who would want to censor a library?<br /><br />At second glance, one will notice&nbsp;Syed Karim, the "founder" of Outernet. Karim was previously "director of innovation" at the Media Development Investment Fund (MDIF) which, surprise, funds the Outernet. And in turn, MDIF is run by former employees of Open Society, with Open Society funding MDIF.<br /><br />In other words, at second glance, we see Open Society behind the Outernet through a series of carefully concealed fronts and an incestuous, tangled web of conflicts of interest. The initial nobility of the concept only further spirals into the abyss of government and corporate sponsored mass public persuasion and manipulation when one reads&nbsp;<a href="https://whiteboard.outernet.is/en/?p=1">the archives of what has actually been broadcast already</a>&nbsp;using Outernet.<br /><br />Some of my favorites include "war surgery," perfect for America's terrorist mercenary army now operating in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Libya. There is also FEMA, WHO's Ebola site and the Albert Einstein Institution: Advancing Freedom Through Nonviolent Action. The Albert Einstein Institution, it should be remembered, played a central role in building up the US State Department's various networks behind so-called "color revolutions" that have since hit Ukraine, the Middle East and even as far as Southeast and East Asia.<br /><br />Content is broadcast based on "votes." But as everyone should know, voting itself is subject to mass manipulation either of the voters' own perception, or of the very mechanics of the vote itself. It is also very clear that content that is either well sponsored, or is put out by well organized groups, gets placed toward the top of the list including links to the Jehovah Witnesses.<br /><br />Thus the "great equalizer" Karim claimed Outernet is, is in fact yet another channel of Western government and corporate propaganda, giving those who already monopolize vast territory amid the information war, yet another weapon to use against unsuspecting minds. The only real feature that makes Outernet different from cable television or the Internet, is the fact that it is broadcast from a satellite, and thus difficult to block in a targeted country, and receivable by whomever the US State Department takes pilfered tax dollars and buys receiver sets for. <br /><br />Currently, however, there is also a lot of very useful information that is being broadcast, voted up by legitimate users of the system, using the system as it should in theory be used. The problem is, whenever special interests want, they can override "the vote," and spread propaganda and sedition anywhere on Earth.<br /><br />It should be noted that projects by Google and Facebook, both partners of the NSA and its information war against humanity, have similar plans to Outernet. They propose roving drones or airships that transmit the Internet all over the world like Outernet's satellite arrangement. Again, it would be assets controlled by the US government and corporations, and potentially beyond the reach of sovereign nations targeted by broadcasts and the sedition they are there to support.<br /><br />It is clear that at least one foot has been placed in space, regarding the ongoing and ever-evolving information war. Other nations are likely to follow suit, placing their own broadcasters above the West and beaming down information the West would otherwise like controlled or silenced altogether. For the hackers and enthusiasts clamoring over the idea of Outernet, they can't be blamed. But they would be wise to look deeper into who is behind it, and think about alternatives they could create to truly realize this concept as it should be, and deny these interests yet another noble cause to hide behind, and ultimately ruin with their deceit.<br /><br /><i style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15.3999996185303px; line-height: 18.4799995422363px;">Ulson Gunnar, a New York-based geopolitical analyst and writer especially for the online magazine “<a href="http://journal-neo.org/" style="color: #6fa8dc; text-decoration: none;">New Eastern Outlook</a>”.</i></div>http://localorg.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-information-war-on-whole-new-level.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Land Destroyer)tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7079343630025538378.post-5756603352893654852Mon, 23 Mar 2015 15:56:00 +00002015-03-23T08:56:39.320-07:003DPrintingconceptsThe Battle to Control the 3D Printing Revolution: DIY or CIA?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><b>March 23, 2015</b> (<a href="http://truth-out.org/news/item/29723-the-battle-to-control-the-3d-printing-revolution-diy-or-cia">Eric Draitser - TruthOut</a>) -&nbsp;Scientific and technological innovations have the power to fundamentally transform human civilization as new possibilities previously deemed impossible are made realities. However, it is not the technologies themselves that dictate the nature of the political, economic or social evolution. Rather, it is control over, and access to, technology that has the truly profound impact. While advanced medicines, new methods of energy production and biotechnology breakthroughs are in themselves important, when monopolized by a select few, the implications for the majority of people can be dire.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-m98ALwIxUo8/VRA3K5EQjuI/AAAAAAAALFs/_Upny-emM4s/s1600/Voxel8Printer.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-m98ALwIxUo8/VRA3K5EQjuI/AAAAAAAALFs/_Upny-emM4s/s1600/Voxel8Printer.jpg" height="468" width="640" /></a></div><br /><br />So it is with the emerging revolution in <a href="http://www.robo3dprinter.com/pages/what-is-3d-printing">3D printing</a>, a technology that manufactures (or "prints"), layer by layer, physical objects from computer models using a variety of materials. While 3D printing has existed in concept since the early 1980s, only in recent years has the technology been brought to the desktop level, allowing individuals and small groups of hobbyists to print a wide variety of objects, from plastic coasters to medical equipment. Having started in the traditional industrial and fabrication setting, it was the application of 3D printing by independent, technologically inclined "hackers" (individuals who manipulate and/or customize computer and electronic equipment to fit their needs) that helped mainstream this technology.<br /><br />Today, there is a consensus among those in the know - from the most ruthless capitalist profit-seekers to anarcho-communist hackers - that the 3D printing revolution is coming, and the world will not be the same once it arrives. So the struggle is not whether there will be 3D printers, but rather how that technology will be used, how it will be dispersed in society, who will have access to it, and who will control and/or steer its development.<br /><br />The central question will not be whether a working-class person can 3D print some household object in his garage; this is a foregone conclusion. Instead, it will be whether or not the ability to 3D print the elemental parts of modern and future society (computer processors, nanobots, telecommunications equipment etc.) will be open to all, or controlled by the few.<br /><br />And it is here, on the front lines of the battle for control and access to this breakthrough technology, that the struggle between the political and economic establishment and the rest of us is taking place. On the one hand, there are those tirelessly working to democratize and decentralize 3D printing, and on the other hand are the powerful forces that seek to monopolize this innovation in order to maintain their grip on power.<br /><br /><b>3D Printing, Decentralization and the DIY Revolution</b><br /><br />As 3D printing gradually moved out of the realm of science fiction to become a technology that could be financially and technically accessible to individuals, the transformative potential of the innovation became readily apparent. Obscure startups such as New York City-based <a href="http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/city-hall/2014/08/8551266/mainstreaming-makerbot">MakerBot</a> brought 3D printing to the desktop via the<a href="http://www.nycresistor.com/">NYC Resistor hackerspace</a> - a "hacker collective" based in Brooklyn where communally owned tools and computers bring together a wide array of innovative technology enthusiasts who share knowledge and expertise in a variety of fields. Such a combination of technical know-how and ideological commitment to collaboration has fueled the creative energies of many such hackerspaces and <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2014/0706/The-maker-movement-creates-D.I.Y.-revolution">makerspaces</a>, and the many politically conscious, often radical activists and non-activists alike, to generate wildly fascinating and innovative breakthroughs.<br /><br /><b><i><a href="http://truth-out.org/news/item/29723-the-battle-to-control-the-3d-printing-revolution-diy-or-cia">Continue Reading via TruthOut ...&nbsp;</a></i></b></div>http://localorg.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-battle-to-control-3d-printing.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Land Destroyer)tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7079343630025538378.post-962902290415072295Wed, 04 Mar 2015 02:09:00 +00002015-03-03T19:29:57.919-08:00conceptsIf You Can't Stop 3D Printed Guns - Print One <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><span style="font-size: large;">People will inevitably 3D print guns and there is nothing you can do to stop them except prepare society to be mature and responsible enough to handle this new power.&nbsp;</span><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-6OfOC-wLux4/VPZnR1q2qZI/AAAAAAAAK-8/vsr-INvUBjQ/s1600/3-Lowers-Side-By-Side-630x382.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-6OfOC-wLux4/VPZnR1q2qZI/AAAAAAAAK-8/vsr-INvUBjQ/s1600/3-Lowers-Side-By-Side-630x382.jpeg" height="242" width="400" /></a></div><b>March 4, 2015 </b>(Tony Cartalucci - LocalOrg) - Guns don't kill people, people kill people. And the sort of people that kill range from the mentally unstable and/or the medicated, to political extremists, to criminals, and of course the biggest killer in human history, the government. Unfortunately, a shortage of weapons or the legal inaccessibility of weaponry never seems to be enough to stop such people from harming or killing others - and levels of violence appear more linked to social and economic issues rather than access to weaponry. <br /><br />Take the United Kingdom and Japan for example, two nations with populations that are for all intents and purposes "disarmed." Despite the UK having a population almost twice as small as Japan's it still has more total murders per year then their Japanese counterparts. The problem is socioeconomic, and so too is the solution. Here, we can see that access to weapons has little correlation to violence.<br /><br />In fact, one could easily overlay a map of global poverty on top a map of global homicides and see the obvious correlation. And despite America's love-affair with firearms, it is by far not the most violent nation on Earth - not even close.<br /><br /><b>Gun Control Made Irrelevant&nbsp;</b><br /><br />Compounding the futility of a government trying to pad every sharp corner in society to "protect us" from harm, is the advent of personal manufacturing. Personal manufacturing allows us to make as many and as varied sharp corners as our minds can conjure. For every law put into place to outlaw each of these proverbial sharp corners, 10 more will take their place.<br /><br />One of these sharp corners includes 3D printed and CNC milled guns.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4ENfkTvVkUA/VPZnLJEhQnI/AAAAAAAAK-0/oF78wvXNoIk/s1600/crwdd1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4ENfkTvVkUA/VPZnLJEhQnI/AAAAAAAAK-0/oF78wvXNoIk/s1600/crwdd1.jpg" height="426" width="640" /></a></div><br /><br />3D Printing Industry author Michael Molitch-Hou in his article, "<a href="http://3dprintingindustry.com/2013/04/05/the-3d-printed-gun-individual-freedom-collective-violence/">The 3D Printed Gun: Individual Freedom, Collective Violence</a>," argues that:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>Steve Israel is concerned with lone wolves. The media, in response to the shootings in Connecticut and Colorado, are concerned with mentally ill loners. Cody Wilson is concerned with personal freedom. The human species, however, is a collective entity, based simply on the fact that we all have to live and work alongside one another. So, perhaps it is our collective that should take some responsibility for these horrible acts of gun violence. What in society could be causing people to commit acts of violence on the scale of Newton and Aurora? Is 3D printing legislation going to prevent violence or might public access to better mental health facilities prevent violence instead? How did our collective not notice the burgeoning instability in Adam Lanza and attempt to do something about it? How does our society, on a regular basis, ignore the systemic inequality that leads to gun violence amongst the impoverished, for instance? In other words, is it possible that, by acknowledging the human species as a collective, we might begin to improve the standard of living of the entire community?</i></blockquote>And although Molitch-Hou, throughout the article appears to make Cody Wilson look as if he is laboring under strained logic, his concluding thoughts quoted above are in fact precisely the solution to violence in American society (and everywhere else for that matter). We must identify the factors that cause violence in the first place and address them, not the implements one may or may not use while being violent.<br /><br /><a name='more'></a>The sort of dystopian police state required to prevent people in their individual homes from designing and printing objects deemed "unsafe" by our current collective sensibilities is probably the nightmare scenario that has Cody Wilson trying to print guns and build a "distributed defense" network in the first place. The fact that people like Steve Israel have tried to build that police state (or rather, add onto an already increasingly invasive police state considering the NSA's recent abuses) only further fuel the warranted paranoia of people like Cody Wilson.<br /><br />Indeed, we must understand the root of violence and work at reducing that, not infringe on the rights of responsible and mature citizens by insisting every "sharp corner" in society be padded, restricted, or otherwise outlawed. <br /><br /><b>Collective Maturity and Responsibility&nbsp;</b><br /><br />Molitch-Hou is right - we are a collective species and we must collectively take responsibility for this awesome power being thrust into our hands by technology - not whimper and withdraw, seeking a police state to step in and make us safe. We must become the keepers of ourselves and our own communities.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-M_we5SI86Ks/VPZosU2_PLI/AAAAAAAAK_I/IqrFS89GJZw/s1600/11police.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-M_we5SI86Ks/VPZosU2_PLI/AAAAAAAAK_I/IqrFS89GJZw/s1600/11police.jpg" height="266" width="400" /></a></div>Indeed, <a href="http://localorg.blogspot.com/2012/11/how-to-end-healthcare-debate-forever.html">better healthcare</a> for the mentally ill is necessary. Addressing the socioeconomic factors that drive crime and violence is another absolute necessity. The fact that crime is higher in the UK than in Japan with total murders in the UK topping those in Japan despite Japan's larger population proves that having a cohesive, harmonious, prosperous society is the key to reducing crime - not the fanatical micromanagement of everyone's lives through increasingly invasive legislation and a growing, militarized police force endowed with the authority to do as they please to whomever they please - a feature the UK has masterfully implemented - but to no avail.<br /><br />And while some might say big-government is necessary to make these changes, others might say, waiting for big-government to address issues like improving healthcare and decreasing socioeconomic disparity is precisely why the problem has gotten so bad in the first place.<br /><br />Indeed, the immense corporate-financier monopolies that thrive on Wall Street, dictate to a large degree the policy created in Washington, then enforced around the country (and the world when foreign interventions are concerned). Walmart has nothing to gain <a href="http://localorg.blogspot.com/2012/12/decenralize-big-retail.html">by decentralizing manufacturing and retail locally</a>, which would also decentralize and redistribute profits, reduce poverty, and improve the prospects of millions across the country. Therefore, national policy will always reflect a desire to keep massive profits concentrated in the hands of a few shareholders, while the rest of the country wallows in poverty and destitution - and of course, suffer the violence associated with both.<br /><br />Chevron, Exxon, and others hold monopolies over energy production. Energy production for electricity and transportation could and should be decentralized as well. The billions upon billions raked in by these energy monopolies would likewise be redistributed as people produced energy and jobs locally.<br /><br /><a href="http://localorg.blogspot.com/2012/12/decentralizing-telecom.html">Telecom</a>, healthcare, food production, and just about every other industry that constitutes modern society likewise, follows a similar pattern. A similar patter of decentralization/localization would in turn, decentralize and redistribute wealth - alleviating the socioeconomic factors creating poverty and the violence that subsequently results from it.<br /><br />At the end of the day, we will not stop people from 3D printing guns, or in fact, from creating anything with increasingly effective and efficient forms of personal manufacturing that might be deemed dangerous. Instead, all we can do is work to build a better, more equitable society where individuals are mature and responsible enough to handle this power, and people incapable of handling such power can get the help they need to prevent hurting themselves or others.<br /><br />If you can't beat 3D printed guns, you might as well be a responsible, mature adult who prints one yourself. Set an example, set a precedent. But if nothing else, work on building a society, a culture, a people, who would rather print such items as a curiosity, for sport, or as a hobby, than wanting to turn them on one another because of socioeconomic disparity, ignorance, ill-health, or irresponsibility.</div>http://localorg.blogspot.com/2015/03/if-you-cant-stop-3d-printed-guns-print.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Land Destroyer)tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7079343630025538378.post-3956197624602452256Sun, 01 Mar 2015 21:16:00 +00002015-03-01T13:16:37.827-08:00conceptsHealthGeneticsOp-Ed: Big Pharma & Gene Therapy <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><b>March 2, 2015</b> (Tony Cartalucci - LocalOrg) I just recently watched a TED Talk - this was the CEO of Bluebird Bio - a pharmaceutical and biotech company - talking about their work on gene therapies.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ez560GnkSrE" width="560"></iframe></div><br />These are cures that work on the first shot - correcting your condition or augmenting your body to repair itself on the genetic level. One shot and you are cured for life - more or less - because the corrected cells then multiple, carrying the corrections on in each additional cell.<br /><br />The work for now can be a bit primitive, but the technology is already drastically changing lives for the better.<br /><br />It is nothing short of revolutionary - it stands to change humanity forever - and if Bluebird Bio doesn't do it, someone else eventually will. The problem is obvious though, these cures may cost a lot to develop but once they are perfected, they cost relatively very little to produce and give to patients compared to traditional and less effective therapies. And when they are given to patients, it is a one time deal.<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div>Realizing this prompted the CEO of Bluebird Bio to say something very questionable - claiming that by fixing a patient on the genetic level, they will from then on be producing his corporation's drug (though not really since it is not a drug, it is corrected DNA) and while he doesn't come right out and say it, anyone familiar with big-pharma and big-biotech's method of operation knows that they expect you to pay for it ... for life.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-x7ftF37tiIM/VPN88U4SjEI/AAAAAAAAK7g/ZUaCvqK0CgM/s1600/bluebird.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-x7ftF37tiIM/VPN88U4SjEI/AAAAAAAAK7g/ZUaCvqK0CgM/s1600/bluebird.png" /></a></div>And so that is how big-pharma plans to continue rolling in piles of money even when technology makes it possible to permanently cure people with a single shot, by extorting people literally like a cartoon villain - demanding "1 million dollars" per life-saving shot - the subject of a previously published report titled, "<a href="http://localorg.blogspot.com/2015/02/big-pharma-dangles-life-and-death-over.html">Big Pharma Dangles Life and Death Over Patients' Heads</a>."<br /><br />There is indeed the valid argument that these treatments cost money to research and develop, and the people involved in doing so deserve to profit from them. And I agree, but guess what? The government gives these corporations millions of dollars through all sorts of grants every year so they can do just that.<br /><br />Here is just one announcement of Bluebird Bio getting just such a grant from the Government of California, "<a href="http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20121026005263/en/bluebird-bio-Awarded-9.3-Million-California-Institute#.VPNy3XyUeXA">Bluebird Bio Awarded $9.3 Million From the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine to Further Gene Therapy Clinical Development</a>," an announcement made in 2012, the same year Bluebird's CEO was on stage giving his Ted Talk.<br /><br />Surely society would be all for giving even more money toward this sort of research - something the government should &nbsp;be doing instead of spending literally a trillion dollars on a single weapons system - <a href="http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2012/10/how-to-waste-trillion-dollars.html">like the F-35</a>. But then there is the reality that greed prevails, and special interests rule.<br /><br />People have got to get informed on gene therapy - it will change humanity forever and whoever controls it controls humanity's future. That being the case, the people should be the one's wielding it, not a handful of corporations dangling life over the heads of sick kids so they can please their investors and stay in business.<br /><br />I admittedly don't know the whole story about Bluebird - I'd hate to say they were corrupt and greedy if they were really doing everything they could within a system that is itself backwards ... but it was difficult to listen to their TED Talk and not walk away feeling I've just been extorted. If you hold the keys to saving lives, you must unlock the door, handsomely rewarded or not. And part of being a "good guy," is taking it upon yourself to create a better system within which life-saving research can move forward without parasitical investors demanding immense profits in return at the expense of both ethics and progress.&nbsp;</div>http://localorg.blogspot.com/2015/03/op-ed-big-pharma-gene-therapy.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Land Destroyer)tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7079343630025538378.post-5122296027028977770Thu, 26 Feb 2015 20:11:00 +00002015-02-26T12:11:58.079-08:00conceptsScience as the New Religion <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><span style="font-size: large;">Irrational faith in corporate R&amp;D is not science, it is a modern day cult.&nbsp;</span><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Bjr5Cql_e8A/VO9yoro5DVI/AAAAAAAAK4A/qYa1GDvTnZA/s1600/natgeo.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Bjr5Cql_e8A/VO9yoro5DVI/AAAAAAAAK4A/qYa1GDvTnZA/s1600/natgeo.png" height="400" width="277" /></a></div><b>February 26, 2015</b> (Tony Cartalucci - LocalOrg) - When money and power are involved, those standing to gain the most will say and do anything to push their agenda forward. Five centuries ago, saying and doing anything involved exploiting people's superstitions and their faith in religion. Today, saying and doing anything means also exploiting science.<br /><br />Science, engineering, and design are amongst our most practical and effective tools to make real and meaningful change. But because they are so powerful and appealing, the potential for their abuse in the wrong hands is immense. Compounding this is the naivety of those who are fascinated by science's promise but blind to its potential abuse.<br /><br />It wasn't long ago when big-tobacco had armies of "scientists" citing the latest "studies" confirming the health benefits and safety of smoking. Of course these were paid liars, not scientists, even if many of them had PhDs. And it was lies they were telling, even if mixed with shades of science. Today, special interests have refined this practice of filtering lies and exploitation through the lens of science regarding everything from genetically modified organisms (GMOs) to the false debate on climate change, to the questionable interests behind global vaccination programs.<br /><br />The latest example of this comes via National Geographic which recently published an article titled, "<a href="http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2015/03/science-doubters/achenbach-text">Why Do Many Reasonable People Doubt Science?</a>," which claims:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>We live in an age when all manner of scientific knowledge—from the safety of fluoride and vaccines to the reality of climate change—faces organized and often furious opposition. Empowered by their own sources of information and their own interpretations of research, doubters have declared war on the consensus of experts.</i></blockquote>Indeed, just as religions claimed a monopoly on morality and spirituality, National Geographic condemns those "empowered by their own sources of information" and "their own interpretations of research," maintaining that the only truth to be found is amongst the "consensus of experts."<br /><br /><b>The Consensus of "Experts"&nbsp;</b><br /><br />The article goes on to claim:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>The idea that hundreds of scientists from all over the world would collaborate on such a vast hoax is laughable—scientists love to debunk one another. It’s very clear, however, that organizations funded in part by the fossil fuel industry have deliberately tried to undermine the public’s understanding of the scientific consensus by promoting a few skeptics.</i></blockquote>National Geographic never explains why "organizations funded in part by the fossil fuel industry" are conspiring to lie, but the notion that "scientists" would conspire to lie is "laughable." After all, scientists work under various organizations funded by special interests as well, including immense corporate-financier interests - many of which overlap with big-oil, ironically. If the billions to be made by big-oil is motivation enough to lie and say the Earth isn't getting warmer, aren't the billions to be made in a "carbon credit" pyramid scheme also motivation enough to lie that it is?<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Ym6m7PU8G98/VO91WdxBnhI/AAAAAAAAK4M/nU_B5kPUlg4/s1600/TheScienceOfSmoking.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Ym6m7PU8G98/VO91WdxBnhI/AAAAAAAAK4M/nU_B5kPUlg4/s1600/TheScienceOfSmoking.jpg" height="640" width="536" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: left;"><i><b>Images</b>: The "science" of smoking. Images collected by the New York Times for their article, "<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/07/business/media/07adco.html?_r=0">When Doctors, and Even Santa, Endorsed Tobacco</a>" depict "scientific studies" assuring consumers of the safety, even benefits of smoking cigarettes commonsense told everyone else were literally killing people. &nbsp;Those today who think they are ahead of everyone else by parroting "scientific studies" regarding big-ag's GMOs, big-pharma's vaccines, and big-oil and bankers' climate change racket are ahead of nothing. They are being duped by an old trick practiced shamelessly for at least 100 years.&nbsp;</i></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><a name='more'></a><br /><br />A truly scientific examination of the facts would reveal that the climate always changes - that humans are most likely impacting the climate since virtually everything else does - but that also both big-oil and big-business possess enough money to buyout both sides of the climate change debate, and profit from it without actually truly understanding the climate or what humanity can do to adjust to it no matter what it does or why.<br /><br />The article then states:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>...evolution actually happened. Biology is incomprehensible without it. There aren’t really two sides to all these issues. Climate change is happening. Vaccines really do save lives. Being right does matter—and the science tribe has a long track record of getting things right in the end. Modern society is built on things it got right.</i></blockquote>Evolution does happen. Biology is incomprehensible without it. The climate does change. The science of vaccines is sound. The problem that most people have with each of these topics is not honestly addressed by National Geographic. The article puts up strawmen arguments to make anyone questioning the established narrative appear exceptionally irrational, even dangerous.<br /><br />Few if anyone seriously questions the theory of evolution. The moon landings are also mentioned in the article, but also are included for the sole purpose of making people questioning the matters of GMO, climate change, and vaccines seem more unreasonable and fanatical.<br /><br />Besides appealing to mainstream "experts," the article doesn't actually address the arguments for or against each of the three latter topics. The article is essentially a long winded hit piece on people questioning the establishment and what it claims science is telling us about each of these three points of contention. It is essentially a warning against "heresy."<br /><br />The few hints included in the article however, reflecting the talking points of big-government, big-business, and big-academia, are easily dismantled with the skeptics' arguments conveniently excluded from the article.<br /><br /><b>GMO and Natural Selection&nbsp;</b><br /><br />National Geographic claims:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>We’re asked to accept, for example, that it’s safe to eat food containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs) because, the experts point out, there’s no evidence that it isn’t and no reason to believe that altering genes precisely in a lab is more dangerous than altering them wholesale through traditional breeding. But to some people the very idea of transferring genes between species conjures up mad scientists running amok—and so, two centuries after Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, they talk about Frankenfood.</i></blockquote>It is true. Traditional breeding has altered the genetic constitution of plants and animals we consume daily. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mS5SvHg7M4">So drastically have we altered many of the grains </a>we consume over the centuries, many people cannot even consume them because of gluten intolerance.<br /><div><br /></div><div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1mS5SvHg7M4" width="560"></iframe></div><div><br /></div><div>Nature too alters genes through mutations and natural selection. These genetic changes can lead some species to success, and in other cases, these genetic changes can lead an entire species toward extinction. In some drastic examples, these genetic changes can lead entire ecosystems into extinction - the greatest example being the Great Oxygenation Event (one of several mass extinction events in Earth's natural history) in which cyanobacterial filled the Earth's atmosphere with oxygen, killing off most of the planet's anaerobic inhabitants.&nbsp;</div><div><br />If nature can lead itself off such catastrophic cliffs with natural genetic mutations, and traditional breeding has altered our food to the point it is not edible to some, what might humans altering DNA inside organisms lead to?<br /><br />Biotechnology cannot be uninvented. While it shouldn't be feared, it should be respected. It should be understood by the greatest number of people across the widest possible social strata. The democratization of this technology means the unlocking of its potential for the greatest possible good for the greatest possible number of people, controlled by the very people who will directly benefit from it.<br /><br />Until then, skepticism regarding products peddled by immense corporate monopolies jealously hording this technology caught time and time again infiltrating government regulatory bodies and running stables of "scientists" and "researchers" churning out "peer reviewed studies" sponsored by the very producers of the subject at hand is not "irrational" nor constitutes a distaste for science, but rather is simple, cautious commonsense.<br /><br /><b>The Problem isn't Vaccines, its the Criminals and Killers Peddling Them&nbsp;</b><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-eh6cGE6AZpA/VO92dxtKH8I/AAAAAAAAK4U/kazIGmImRoE/s1600/2013-5-24_GSK.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-eh6cGE6AZpA/VO92dxtKH8I/AAAAAAAAK4U/kazIGmImRoE/s1600/2013-5-24_GSK.jpg" height="223" width="400" /></a></div>Commonsense also tells us that rolling up our sleeve and allowing ourselves to be injected by a substance produced by literal criminals is a demonstration of unhinged, absolute insanity.<br /><br />Indeed, the manufacturers of vaccines are criminals, literally. One example is GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), an immense pharmaceutical giant based in the UK. It has been caught on at least 3 separate continents engaged in a multi-billion dollar bribery racket. In China when the police began investigating the systemic corruption driving GSK's sales in Asia, GSK attempted to bribe the police as well.<br /><br />The Financial Times would report in an article titled, "<a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/fe669bfc-db23-11e3-b112-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3Ssb2Ja6N">Police accuse GlaxoSmithKline China head of ‘ordering’ bribes</a>," that:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>According to the official, the company’s China subsidiary set up several internal units with code names like “operation Great Wall” and “operation soaring dragon” specifically to bribe doctors and government officials.&nbsp;</i>&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>He also said that in 2012, as the company came under scrutiny from the authorities, Mr Reilly and two Chinese subordinates established a “crisis management team” to bribe law enforcement officers from China’s industrial and commercial administration. The goal was to convince them to stop an investigation into the company’s illegal activity, the official said.</i></blockquote><br />The pharmaceutical giant has been caught in Europe, the Middle East, and the US in similar bribery rackets of equal immensity.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.gsk.com/en-gb/about-us/what-we-do/vaccines/">GSK also manufactures vaccines</a> for diseases including&nbsp;hepatitis, rotavirus and HPV infections, diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, measles, mumps, rubella, bacterial meningitis, and influenza. The question of whether or not properly manufactured vaccines can guard against the above mentioned diseases isn't the question, the question is why would anyone trust their health and life to a corporation engaged in global-spanning criminality?<br /><br />But GSK's bribery scandals and the fact that virtually all other mega-pharmaceutical corporations are engaged in similar practices isn't the worst of it.<br /><br />During the height of South Africa's apartheid system, government scientists were working on vaccines that would devastate the nation's black communities. The Economist would report in an article titled, "<a href="http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21641303-when-forgive-when-not-forget-dr-death-and-prime-evil">Dr Death and Prime Evil</a>," that (emphasis added):<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>In contrast to the conviction of Mr de Kock stands the bizarre case of Wouter Basson (pictured), a medical doctor who ran the apartheid government’s chemical and biological warfare programme. Nicknamed “Dr Death” by newspapers, he was granted immunity for many crimes because they allegedly took place outside South Africa. As Dr Death he allegedly provided cyanide capsules to soldiers,<b> and tried to develop bacteria that would selectively kill black people, as well as vaccines to make black women infertile.</b></i></blockquote>The United Nations would elaborate on this biological weapons program in their report titled, "<a href="http://www.unidir.org/files/publications/pdfs/project-coast-apartheid-s-chemical-and-biological-warfare-programme-296.pdf">Project Coast: Apartheid’s Chemical and Biological Warfare Programme</a>," which stated (emphasis added):<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>One example of this interaction involved anti-fertility work. According to documents from RRL [Roodeplaat Research Laboratories], the facility had a number of registered projects aimed at developing an anti-fertility vaccine. This was a personal project of the first managing director of RRL, Dr Daniel Goosen. Goosen, who had done research into embryo transplants, told the TRC that he and Basson had discussed the possibility of <b>developing an anti-fertility vaccine which could be selectively administered—<u>without the knowledge of the recipient</u>.</b> The intention, he said, was <b>to administer it to black South African women <u>without their knowledge</u>.</b></i></blockquote><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Dyhd2-QCgmE/VO92m877yoI/AAAAAAAAK4c/rfOI6cREvyA/s1600/bioWarfareZA.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Dyhd2-QCgmE/VO92m877yoI/AAAAAAAAK4c/rfOI6cREvyA/s1600/bioWarfareZA.jpg" height="253" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: left;"><i><b>Image</b>: Dr. Basson helped develop vaccines aimed at destroying South Africa's<br />black communities. They were to be given to victims without their knowledge.</i></td></tr></tbody></table>One wonders what sort of lies the South African media would have invented, when black women began to realize the vaccines were in fact a weapon aimed at them and their communities and began warning others not to take them. Would terms like "anti-vaxxers" have been invented, and parades of "scientists" rolled out to assure South Africans that vaccines were perfectly safe and those refusing to take them were dangerously ignorant? Would South Africa's version of National Geographic have claimed such people were simply being irrational in the face of the unquestionable reasoning of science?<br /><br />Why is National Geographic now calling people "irrational" for being suspicious of vaccines when they are created by criminal corporations and when there are recent examples of governments using vaccines as weapons against their own people?<br /><br />It might also trouble readers to know that South Africa's repressive, racist, genocidal regime at the time received significant support from the United States and many European nations. This included both political support and&nbsp;<a href="http://monthlyreview.org/2013/04/01/the-military-defeat-of-the-south-africans-in-angola/">significant military aid</a>. <br /><br />Considering all of this, it would seem rather unreasonable to trust "the experts."<br /><br />As with GMOs, studies underwriting the safety and necessity of these vaccines <a href="http://localorg.blogspot.com/2014/07/compromised-vaccine-study-reveals-crux.html">are also subject to immense lobbying efforts and outright corruption and criminality</a>. Efforts to vaccinate the entire population of the planet (7 billion and counting) with a growing number of vaccines, including boosters for those who have already received them, is worth billions upon billions. Trusting "scientists" without considering the possibility this immense fortune might skew their objectivity is folly. It is just as dangerous to be ignorant of the human condition and its corruptibility as it is to be ignorant of scientific facts regarding diseases and the benefits of vaccines.<br /><br />What is the truth behind the science of vaccines? They work. They may or may not be necessary in nations whose populations have access to proper nutrition along with modern sanitation and hygiene practices. If vaccines are to be distributed, they should be manufactured and administered by interests outside of government and corporate entities, both of whom have proven beyond doubt they cannot be trusted with such a responsibility.<br /><br /><b>Climate Change Will Happen, With or Without Us&nbsp;</b><br /><br />Everything from the sun, to geological processes, to constantly evolving ecosystems have an impact on the climate. There is no "normal" climate we must attempt to maintain. Millions of years before human civilization, CO2 levels and temperatures were many times higher than what they are now. During the Cretaceous period there were no ice caps and the continent of Antarctica was covered with lush temperate forests inhabited by dinosaurs.<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Wff1G2ZMRJc/VO92-CIs6ZI/AAAAAAAAK4k/oIMxlkNfaRA/s1600/094.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Wff1G2ZMRJc/VO92-CIs6ZI/AAAAAAAAK4k/oIMxlkNfaRA/s1600/094.jpg" height="404" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: left;"><i><b>Image</b>: The future after anthropogenic climate change causes sea levels to rise? No, this is the Earth tens of millions of years ago when CO2 levels were 15 times higher than they are today and Antarctica was covered in temperate forests filled with dinosaurs. Climate change is going to happen with or without humanity, and instead of working on policy, we should be working on technology that will help us minimize our impact on the Earth (and our own health) and 'weather' the weather, no matter what it does or why. &nbsp;</i></td></tr></tbody></table>Humanity itself has seen wild fluctuations in the climate, enduring an ice age and an exceptionally warm period during Medieval times.<br /><br />The fact that the climate of the planet naturally changes, however, does not absolve humans from minimizing their impact on the planet. Beyond ending the reckless genetic contamination of the planet's genetic heritage through the use of GMOs, the petrochemical industry and the heavily centralized consumerist paradigm that currently exists must also be dismantled, decentralized, and converted to more sustainable and healthier alternatives, not only for the planet, but for society and human beings individually.<br /><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-uhDd6OXnMCA/VO95wqXH6bI/AAAAAAAAK4w/B0ngZUZiVRA/s1600/carbon_counter-717790.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-uhDd6OXnMCA/VO95wqXH6bI/AAAAAAAAK4w/B0ngZUZiVRA/s1600/carbon_counter-717790.jpg" height="640" width="508" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: left;"><i><b>Image</b>:&nbsp;Deutsche Bank's "CO2 Clock" meant to leverage people's fear of anthropogenic climate change directly into billions via a "carbon credit" pyramid scheme. While big-oil makes billions off of petrochemicals destroying the environment and then denying their role in doing so, their literal bankrollers are making billions exploiting public outrage over their practices. Meanwhile, the climate may or may not be changing, with or without humans driving it, and no one is genuinely examining it because they are all entangled in this immense racket. &nbsp;</i></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br />That should be a conclusion both sides of the current climate change debate could agree on - one doesn't need to be a scientist to understand the impact on human health car exhaust has on the human body or the immense waste involved in manufacturing plastic trinkets in China, putting them on a ship to steam across oceans to be put onto trucks to be put into a Walmart and sit under lights burning 24 hours a day to be bought by a consumer who drove to the store and now must drive back home.<br /><br />But dismantling immense oil and retail monopolies and<a href="http://localorg.blogspot.com/2012/12/decenralize-big-retail.html"> replacing them with self-sufficient, high-tech local communities</a> seems to be furthest from the minds of those championing urgent activism in response to climate change. Instead, they propose even more power be put into the hands of governments, banks, and corporations to create "policy." The "policy" to no one's surprise, leaves more power centralized in the hands of the very special interests that are truly and quantifiably destroying the environment.<br /><br />Why aren't people seeking technological rather than political solutions to address climate change? What if we mitigate humanity's impact on the climate, and it still changes, just as it has for hundreds of millions of years before humans walked the Earth? Will "carbon credits" feed us if the world becomes incredibly cold, destroying global agriculture? Will it hold back flood waters if oceans rise despite our greatest efforts? Some how, "science" has convinced people to worry immensely about a problem but do nothing at all practical about it.<br /><br />What is it about rational "science" that has people acting so irrationally?<br /><br /><b>Science as the New Religion&nbsp;</b><br /><br />Hiding behind science is nothing new. Darwinists hid behind it to prop up their racism, which in fact inspired the Nazis to hide behind it to scientifically prove they were the "master race." The Nazis, in fact, loved science, and used it with horrible precision. As mentioned before, big-tobacco used "science" to prove their products were perfectly "safe." What precisely has convinced people today that such charades are not still playing out, more refined now than ever? <br /><br />As National Geographic stated, people love their tribes. Those who have circled their wagons around "science" as their chosen dogma, are no different than the religious they believe themselves to be superior to. They have not truly and objectively looked into any of the issues they blindly support - and as National Geographic did, simply claim "it's science!" or that "experts said!"<br /><br />The arguments made for GMO, vaccines, and climate change are made by the same circle of special interests and propagated by their immense media monopolies. Little they say can be independently verified by the army of sycophants that eagerly repeat their claims. Citing a "peer reviewed study" is different than reproducing an experiment's results oneself.<br /><br />Also troubling is that following the money to see just how valid or compromised such studies might be seems not to even factor into this tribe's calculus. Their belief that scientists are infallible and incorruptible is as naive as those who believe their respective priest classes are likewise somehow above all others morally, spiritually, and intellectually.<br /><br />National Geographic's article will undoubtedly help reinforce this new, backwards religion of "science," while leaving real science battered, abused, and a stolen shield carried by liars as they carry out misdeeds against others. And while this new religion will swear their "science" is the only answer - all others might hear is yet another and particularly shrill voice amongst many others drowning out the voice of real reason.&nbsp;</div></div></div>http://localorg.blogspot.com/2015/02/science-as-new-religion.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Land Destroyer)tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7079343630025538378.post-4437335463806776801Sun, 22 Feb 2015 12:49:00 +00002015-02-22T04:49:21.237-08:00IT NSA's SIM Card Scandal Bigger Than You Think <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><span style="font-size: large;">Stolen encryption keys are just the beginning. US NSA appears to have compromised big telecom, IT manufacturers, online banking, and even passports, starting on the factory floor. </span><br /><br /><b>February 22, 2015</b> (<a href="http://journal-neo.org/2015/02/22/nsa-and-gchq-big-brother-would-have-never-believed/">Vladimir Platov - NEO</a>) - Recent days have been marked by a record number of news stories regarding the US and its allies trying to establish total control over Internet users.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-XMOQNLT7RdQ/VOnNDaRLj7I/AAAAAAAAK24/Xs2LEawMO1I/s1600/Snowden-NSA-Punya-Kunci-Untuk-Sadap-Seluruh-SIM-Card-di-Dunia.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-XMOQNLT7RdQ/VOnNDaRLj7I/AAAAAAAAK24/Xs2LEawMO1I/s1600/Snowden-NSA-Punya-Kunci-Untuk-Sadap-Seluruh-SIM-Card-di-Dunia.jpg" height="360" width="640" /></a></div><br />On February 16, researchers at the Moscow-based security group <a href="http://www.popsci.com/most-sophisticated-malware-ever-can-infect-hard-drive-firmware">Kaspersky Lab</a> announced the discovery of the ultimate virus which has virtually infected all spheres of military and civilian computing in more than 40 countries around the world. They’ve managed to discover a piece of malware that must have been installed on hard disks while they were still being manufactured, and due to its complexity and a certain number of features that it shares with Stuxnet, it’s safe to assume that it was created by US secret services. <br /><br />On February 18, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/feb/18/uk-admits-unlawfully-monitoring-legally-privileged-communications">The Guardian confirmed</a> that for the last 7 years Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) had been sharing personal intelligence data en masse with America’s national security agencies, regardless of the fact that it had intercepted millions of foreign citizens' conversations. The ruling of a UK court clearly suggests that these actions were illegal on top of being carried out in violation of the the European Convention on Human Rights. <br /><br />On February 19, it was announced that the National Security Agency (NSA) along with its British partner in crime –GCHQ, has manged to steal encryption keys from Gemalto – the world’s largest manufacturer of SIM-cards. This allowed the above named intelligence agencies to tap any phone and intercept data from any mobile device that was using a SIM-card produced by Gemalto. This conspiracy was unveiled by The Intercept, which added that Gemalto was created nine years ago when the French company Axalto merged with Gemplus International which was operating in Luxembourg. Today Gemalto has more that 85 offices across the globe along with a total of 40 factories, working in close cooperation with leading telecommunication corporations, including AT&amp;T, Verizon and T-Mobile, along with many others. Representatives of the three aforementioned companies refused to comment on this scandal.&nbsp; <br /><br /><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="more"></a><br /><a name='more'></a><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-olppQ9TpK-c/VOnNWn0KMwI/AAAAAAAAK3A/xypSOGVhPWY/s1600/131029020551-gemran-protests-obama-spying-story-top.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-olppQ9TpK-c/VOnNWn0KMwI/AAAAAAAAK3A/xypSOGVhPWY/s1600/131029020551-gemran-protests-obama-spying-story-top.jpg" height="225" width="400" /></a></div>One can easily count German Deutsche Telekom among the customers of the Gemalto group. Hence there is little doubt regarding the involvement of US intelligence in the tapping of Angela Merkel’s mobile phone, an incident uncovered back in mid 2014. What is particularly peculiar in this situation is the decision of The Federal Attorney General of Germany ending the investigation of the Chancellor's tapped phone - <a href="http://www.focus.de/digital/handy/blackberry-q10-merkel-erhaelt-neues-krypto-handy_id_3946209.html">as reported by Focus Online</a> - on the pretext of “zero possible outcome of the investigation.” Well, the claims of the same Focus Online that “Merkel now has a new cell phone that cannot be tapped,” looks ridiculous enough, since this brand “new phone” uses the same-old Gemalto SIM-card. So the NSA can spy on Madam Chancellor as long as they see fit, while the attorney general sees nothing wrong about it. Well, perhaps, Germany has finally agreed to stand in line with the citizens of other countries and their political and business elite, eager to play the role of laboratory rats in the US intelligence surveillance game. <br /><br />One would be surprised to learn that Gemalto is producing up to 2 billion SIM-cards per year, along with chips for bank cards and identity cards. According to many information security experts, US intelligence agencies, due to the encryption keys they’ve stolen are able to retrieve any information from mobile devices, bank cards, and/or e-passports. <br /><br />The <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/americans-cellphones-targeted-in-secret-u-s-spy-program-1415917533">Wall Street Journal reported</a> the “successes” of US intelligence agencies in retrieving information from millions of US citizens’ cell phones back in 2014. Most of America's citizens are under constant watch of US security, due to surveillance systems mounted on light aircraft and drones developed by Boeing, which allows them to collect private data from thousands of mobile phones. In addition to the ability to establish the whereabouts of a person, which can be tracked with the accuracy to within three meters, his phone can be remotely block, while all information stored on it can be easily stolen. <br /><br />On February 20, the spokesperson for the United States Department of State <a href="http://www.rtl.fr/actu/international/etats-unis-l-etat-bloque-des-milliers-d-attaques-informatiques-quotidienne-7776693144">Jen Psaki</a> in her typical manner complained about how difficult it is for the US to confront thousands of hostile attacks in cyberspace. However, she has never mentioned the above listed facts and Washington’s paranoid desire to dominate cyberspace. <br /><br /><i>Vladimir Platov, an expert on the Middle East, exclusively for the online magazine <a href="http://journal-neo.org/">“New Eastern Outlook” </a></i> </div>http://localorg.blogspot.com/2015/02/nsas-sim-card-scandal-bigger-than-you.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Land Destroyer)tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7079343630025538378.post-7042960443787522270Thu, 19 Feb 2015 16:45:00 +00002015-02-19T08:45:18.117-08:00HealthGeneticsBig Pharma Dangles Life and Death Over Patients' Heads<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><span style="font-size: large;">Breakthroughs in gene therapy mean a single shot could cure you ... permanently ... but for a price.&nbsp;</span><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zVBkbf58d9U/VOYJ45BpVLI/AAAAAAAAK1Q/oDnk2hkqQZw/s1600/BIG-PHARMA.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zVBkbf58d9U/VOYJ45BpVLI/AAAAAAAAK1Q/oDnk2hkqQZw/s1600/BIG-PHARMA.jpg" height="266" width="400" /></a></div><b>February 19, 2015</b> (Tony Cartalucci - LocalOrg) - <a href="http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2012/12/on-cusp-of-ending-big-pharma.html">Gene therapy</a> involves identifying and replacing faulty or missing genes, or engineering augmentations for existing genes to permanently cure a wide number of conditions and illnesses ranging from cancer and diabetes, to regenerative processes like rebuilding hearts or storing sight and hearing.<br /><br />A breakthrough clinical trial in 2012 saw several patients stricken with incurable leukemia put into permanent remission using gene therapy. The actual process of creating re-engineered cells taken from a patient and reintroducing them costs approximately $15,000, and such procedures are still in the experimental phase. While this cost does not include the required intensive care required to bring a patient from the brink of death back into full health, it is likely the costs in the near future will be drastically lower than current and far less effective cancer treatments are today.<br /><br />The transformative power of this new technology spells the end of big pharmaceutical monopolies who wallow in billions in profits year to year, enabling them to continue dominating modern medical practice through the skewing of regulatory bodies, the stacking of academic studies, and even the expansive, <a href="http://journal-neo.org/2014/06/04/glaxo-s-china-scandal-exposes-big-pharma-s-ugly-underworld/">global bribery of doctors and other medical practitioners</a> to push big pharma's products. <br /><br />As gene therapy enters into mainstream medicine, big pharma has attempted to control it. In order to continue reaping the unwarranted profits, influence, and power big pharma has accumulated over the decades, they plan to compensate for the drastic drop in prices and the fact that many conditions will now be permanently curable, cutting patients off from a lifetime of dependency on big pharma's cocktails.<br /><br /><a name='more'></a>Essentially, they have announced that patients will be placed essentially into lifetime debt in exchange for single treatments that will cure them - cures that will be priced at around $1 million. <br /><br />Indeed, Reuters would report in an article titled, "<a href="http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/02/19/uk-usa-healthcare-payments-insight-idUKKBN0LN08D20150219">Insight - Paying for gene therapy: are annuities the next big thing?</a>," that:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>Drugmakers contend that a one-time cure, even at a price of more than $1 million, would save money over the long term. But there are concerns that health insurers will balk at covering that kind of upfront cost.</i></blockquote>The therapies do not cost $1 million, keeping big pharma a monopoly does. Reuters also includes in their article insurers demanding exorbitantly priced medications be discounted, and under pressure, big pharma was able to cut prices by as much as 50% and still stay in business.&nbsp;<div><br /></div><div><b>The Solution - Decentralize Healthcare</b></div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>Gene therapies are a focus of a much larger, emerging field of applied science called "synthetic biology." Synthetic biology is the use of synthesized DNA rather than the mere cutting and pasting of it to engineer biological solutions much more precisely. There is also a dimension of greater standardization, which is being done by organizations and institutions driven by an ethos of open source information, software, and hardware.<br /><br />While many institutions and corporations are involved in synthetic biology, it is not as inaccessible as biotech has thus far been. In fact, universities, high schools, and independent local "do-it-yourself" labs are engaged in practicing and contributing to the field of synthetic biology.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>For those that believe big pharma is a problem, the solution is not merely vocally opposing their business models and practices, but also directly challenging them and undermining them by contributing to and building up an open synthetic biology movement.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>For readers, their first step should be looking up more information online - <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIYbio">Wikipedia is a good starting point</a>. For those lucky enough to live near a <a href="http://diybio.org/">DIYbio lab</a>, they should stop by and see about participating in their next workshop. Universities are also involved in public outreach and may have workshops or classes available.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>For those who feel they are unable to directly contribute, simply helping to raise awareness is the next best thing. The more people that understand this new emerging technology, the more voices there will be calling for it to be driven in the right direction for the right reasons. &nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>Gene therapy and other breakthroughs driven by a greater understanding of our genome belong to everyone. That big pharma stands now before humanity, dangling life and death over our heads for an arbitrary $1 million like a cartoon-style villain, shows that we have terribly misplaced our trust and this responsibility in their hands. It is time to take it back, and do with it what should have been done long ago - use it to save lives and improve humanity, not merely feed off of it.<br /> </div></div>http://localorg.blogspot.com/2015/02/big-pharma-dangles-life-and-death-over.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Land Destroyer)tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7079343630025538378.post-7397430714516191477Sat, 31 Jan 2015 05:37:00 +00002015-01-30T21:37:55.493-08:00diyBioHealthGeneticsSciTechsolutionsThe Coming Biological Infowar: US Proposes DNA Database<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-REJLpuPT1g0/VMxoFbmnL2I/AAAAAAAAKoo/1UJWEfDnECM/s1600/514467main_41s_factoring_DNA_1024.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-REJLpuPT1g0/VMxoFbmnL2I/AAAAAAAAKoo/1UJWEfDnECM/s1600/514467main_41s_factoring_DNA_1024.jpg" height="300" width="400" /></a></div><b>January 31, 2015</b> (Tony Cartalucci - LocalOrg) - The US is proposing a government-backed DNA database composed of over a million volunteers' genetic material. RT would report in their article, "<a href="http://rt.com/usa/227967-dna-genetic-analysis-disease/">Got genes: Obama proposes genetic biobank of 1mn Americans’ DNA to fight disease</a>," that: <br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>A new $215 million US government proposal would seek more than 1 million American volunteers for analysis of their genetic information in an initiative to fight disease, while developing targeted health care based on one’s DNA.</i> </blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i> </i><i> Officials hope the biobank project, announced Friday by President Barack Obama, can merge existing genetic studies with a diverse range of new volunteers to hit 1 million participants. </i></blockquote>While this initial database is composed of volunteers, involuntary blood samples are already collected by US law enforcement agencies around the country and amassed in an existing, and ever-expanding network. Additionally, the new proposal seeks to establish "precision medicine" as a standard in medical care, implying that everyone's DNA will eventually be required by medical practitioners to administer increasingly state-run healthcare.<br /><br />Such information will undoubtedly end up in an expanded, nationwide iteration of this new proposed network.&nbsp; <br /><br /><a name='more'></a><br /><b>Serial Abusers and Their New Toy&nbsp; </b><br /><br />While precision medicine is indeed a powerful tool in fighting disease and repairing injury - in fact, truly the future of medicine - those appointing themselves as its arbiter in the US have already demonstrated they cannot be trusted with such a responsibility. <br /><br />RT would also note in their report that: <i><br /></i><br /><blockquote><i>How the US government will ensure that individual genetic information is kept private will certainly become a point of concern for many. A government-led database system amassing genetic coding will likely face resistance in this age of a global spying regime run by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and a genetic patent system used by the likes of Monsanto to consolidate legal ownership of the natural world. </i></blockquote>Indeed, a DNA database would be to our bodies, what the Internet was to our computers - with an NSA-like entity invading, abusing, exploiting, and manipulating not just our personal data, but the very genetic code that makes us who we are. The dangers are immense, and the abuse of genetic information has already been eagerly explored by the very special interests driving this new initiative. <br /><br />The prospect of using one's genes against them in the form of genospecific weapons was mentioned in the Neo-Conservative Project for a New American Century's (PNAC) 2000 report titled, "<a href="http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf">Rebuilding America's Defenses" (.pdf)</a> which stated: <br /><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>The proliferation of ballistic and cruise missiles and long-range unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) will make it much easier to project military power around the globe.&nbsp; Munitions themselves will become increasingly accurate, while new methods of attack – electronic, “non-lethal,” biological – will be more widely available. (<a href="http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf">p.71 of .pdf</a>) <br /><br />Although it may take several decade for the process of transformation to unfold, in time, the art of warfare on air, land, and sea will be vastly different than it is today, and&nbsp; “combat” likely will take place in new dimensions: in space, “cyber-space,” and perhaps the world of microbes.&nbsp; (<a href="http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf">p.72 of .pdf</a>)<br /><br />And advanced forms of biological warfare that can “target” specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool. (<a href="http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf">p.72 of .pdf</a>)</i></blockquote>This targeting will require a database of genetic information - which when coupled with the NSA's already omnipresent surveillance - will enable the growing police state to locate and target individuals with genospecific weapons with unimaginable precision - a literal "touch of death" on equal to mythological gods able to strike down their enemies at will.&nbsp; <br /><br /><b>How to Have the Best of Both Worlds&nbsp;</b><br /><br />The race to establish a top-down healthcare system based on genetically-driven precision medicine is done with the knowledge that the democratization of technology, including that involved in biology and genetics, is accelerating toward local labs being able to reproduce or even out-compete developments made by large pharmaceutical giants. This follows the same pattern IT followed, where disruptive technology, institutions, and paradigms allowed for rapid decentralization and downsizing.<br /><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8CQ_2gN3ov8/VMxptlWpONI/AAAAAAAAKo0/IyBCguf-N6E/s1600/article1a.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8CQ_2gN3ov8/VMxptlWpONI/AAAAAAAAKo0/IyBCguf-N6E/s1600/article1a.jpg" height="245" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr align="left"><td class="tr-caption"><i><b>Image</b>: Precision medicine can precisely help us. It can also precisely hurt. </i></td></tr></tbody></table>Small groups of people or even individuals now have a platform online with which to compete against multi-million dollar media studios. Likewise, 3D printing is driving a similar revolution in manufacturing. <br /><br />"Do-it-Yourself biology" (DIYbio) is now positioned to disrupt the fields of biotech, human health, and medicine.<br /><br />With DIYbio, individuals and communities can manage their own genetic information, sharing it how and when they decide, and work directly on applications to alter, improve, or repair it. The decentralization of this powerful technology also will establish a balance of power. Those with malevolent intentions will be kept in check by the fact that so many more people have a vested interest in preventing the abuse of this technology. <br /><br />Like in the world of IT today, backups, firewalls, and a general knowledge of "good practices" will help protect the vast majority from the abuse of emerging genetically-driven precision medicine.<br /><br />Already, there is a wealth of information online regarding DIYbio - which like its counterpart in IT - maintains an open source, collaborative ethos. People, understanding that preventing the use of this technology is impossible, can begin empowering themselves with it to ensure a balance of power is struck to prevent its wide scale abuse.<br /><br />Coincidentally, the proposed decentralization of the Internet by local mesh networks would also serve to build defenses for genetic information stored by individuals on such networks. Establishing and promoting the idea of moving away from all forms of highly centralized systems maintained by serial offenders of our privacy and human rights, by democratizing the very technology they seek to monopolize and use against us, is the first step in winning this new battle before it starts. <br /></div>http://localorg.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-coming-biological-infowar-us.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Land Destroyer)tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7079343630025538378.post-4344680126662619687Wed, 24 Dec 2014 07:10:00 +00002014-12-23T23:10:13.882-08:00conceptsITFacebook: Colonialism 2.0<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div class="separator" style="background-color: white; clear: both; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-feEoAsbQyKU/VIgJl-RILNI/AAAAAAAAKYk/qudGDb8iKao/s1600/facebook-cover1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; color: #6fa8dc; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-decoration: none;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-feEoAsbQyKU/VIgJl-RILNI/AAAAAAAAKYk/qudGDb8iKao/s1600/facebook-cover1.jpg" style="-webkit-box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.0980392) 1px 1px 5px; background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 1px solid rgb(238, 238, 238); box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.0980392) 1px 1px 5px; padding: 5px; position: relative;" width="300" /></a></div><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: medium;">Putting the entire planet online... then controlling everything they see or read.&nbsp;</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"><br /></b><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"></span><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">December 24, 2014</b><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">&nbsp;(</span><a href="http://journal-neo.org/2014/12/24/facebook-colonialism-2-0/" style="background-color: white; color: #6fa8dc; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px; text-decoration: none;">Tony Cartalucci - NEO</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">) - The Western media has attempted to portray Mark Zuckerberg's ambitious plan to get every human being online as altruistic at first, but later revealed as simply what could be called "profitable empathy." In reality however, the truth is much more sinister, with Facebook already revealed to be much more than a mere corporation run by Zuckerberg and his "ideas"&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">Facebook is the pinnacle of social engineering, an online operant conditioning chamber - also known as a Skinner box - that is being used to track, trace, document, and manipulate half of the entire online population. Despite users attempting to utilize Facebook to connect and communicate with individuals and organizations of interest, Facebook has turned its features against users, insidiously manipulating their timelines to show selected posts and updates&nbsp;<a href="http://localorg.blogspot.com/2014/09/facebooks-soft-censorship.html" style="color: #6fa8dc; text-decoration: none;">while "soft censoring" others</a>&nbsp;to manage public perception.<br /><br />"Studies" have even been published proving the effectiveness of Facebook's unethical social engineering. In one study, the emotions of users were successfully manipulated by selectively posting only negative or only positive posts from individuals or organizations on users' contact lists.&nbsp;</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"><span style="line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">A report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) titled, "</span><a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full" style="color: #888888; line-height: 21.5599994659424px; text-decoration: none;">Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks</a><span style="line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">," stated in its abstract that (emphasis added):&nbsp;</span></span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">We show, via a massive (N = 689,003) experiment on Facebook, that emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. We provide experimental evidence that emotional contagion occurs without direct interaction between people (exposure to a friend expressing an emotion is sufficient), and in the complete absence of nonverbal cues.&nbsp;<b>Not only are the findings troubling - illustrating that Facebook possesses the ability to influence the emotions of its users unwittingly through careful manipulation of their news feeds - but the invasive, unethical methods by which Facebook conducted the experiment are troubling as well.</b></span></i></blockquote><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">In another experiment&nbsp;<a href="http://rt.com/usa/202019-facebook-user-manipulation-election/" style="color: #888888; line-height: 21.5599994659424px; text-decoration: none;">Facebook manipulated the news feed of some 2 million Americans in 2012</a><span style="line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">&nbsp;in order to increase public participation during that year's US presidential election.&nbsp;</span></span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></span><br /><a name='more'></a><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="-webkit-box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.0980392) 1px 1px 5px; background: rgb(255, 255, 255); border: 1px solid rgb(238, 238, 238); box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.0980392) 1px 1px 5px; color: black; float: right; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px; margin-left: 1em; padding: 5px; position: relative; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Wzu32Sh0u0g/VIgEC6ylIAI/AAAAAAAAKYQ/taRr-b2Q3lg/s1600/MovementsSponsorsScreen.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; color: #6fa8dc; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Wzu32Sh0u0g/VIgEC6ylIAI/AAAAAAAAKYQ/taRr-b2Q3lg/s1600/MovementsSponsorsScreen.jpg" style="-webkit-box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.0980392) 0px 0px 0px; background: transparent; border: none; box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.0980392) 0px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative;" width="297" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12px; text-align: left;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;"><b>Image</b>: US State Department's "Movement.org" helped<br />train hundreds of operatives years ahead of US-backed<br />subversion across the Arab World in 2011. Among the<br />many sponsors of this program is Facebook and Google.&nbsp;</span></i></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">Facebook&nbsp;<a href="http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2011/02/googles-revolution-factory.html" style="color: #6fa8dc; text-decoration: none;">was also an official sponsor of the US State Department's training program</a>&nbsp;preparing political subversion across North Africa and the Middle East years before the so-called "Arab Spring" unfolded. The very activists audiences around the world were told "spontaneously" sprung up across North Africa and the Middle East were in fact trained, funded, and equipped by the US State Department and various corporations including tech giants Google and Facebook years beforehand.<br /><br /><b>Turning a Network of Information into a One-Way Propaganda Pipeline&nbsp;</b><br />The implications of an Internet commandeered by a conglomerate of Wall Street and Washington special interests is the mitigation of user-driven content and the retrenchment of information consumerism.&nbsp;</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">Television "programming" could be perceived as both the process of programming what will appear on TV, but also could be perceived as programming the minds of those consuming television. TV, being a one-way process, effectively eliminates competing ideas and limits the scope of information down to only what those who control television networks want audiences to see and hear. It is clear that Facebook is part of a process to turn the Internet into a similar one-way experience. &nbsp;</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"></span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="more" style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"></a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">As a result of Facebook's successful experiments in social engineering, including the very successful political subversion carried out across the Arab World - subversion still ravaging the region to this day - &nbsp;Facebook and the corporate-financier interests behind it seek to put the entire planet within this increasingly insidious, pervasive, and one-way network.&nbsp;</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"></span><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The Bait and Switch&nbsp;</span></b><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">Time Magazine's article, "</span><a href="http://time.com/facebook-world-plan/" style="background-color: white; color: #6fa8dc; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px; text-decoration: none;">The Man Who Wired the World</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">," claims Facebook's "crusade" to get the entire human population online is merely business. What is described however is a global campaign to produce content offline users will care enough about to get online, where Facebook believes it will be only inevitable that they end up on Facebook as well to share that content. Time's article would state specifically (emphasis added):&nbsp;</span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"><i>Here’s the idea. First, you&nbsp;<b>look at a particular geographical region that’s underserved, Internet-wise, and figure out what content might be compelling enough to lure its inhabitants online. Then you gather that content up, make sure it’s in the right language and wrap it up in a slick app. Then you go to the local cell-phone providers and convince as many of them as possible that they should offer the content in your app for free, with no data charges. There you go: anybody who has a data-capable phone has Internet access—or at least access to a curated, walled sliver of the Internet—for free.&nbsp;</b></i>&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"><i>This isn’t hypothetical: Internet.org released this app in Zambia in July. It launched in Tanzania in October. In Zambia,&nbsp;<b>the app’s content offerings include AccuWeather, Wikipedia, Google Search, the Mobile Alliance for Maternal Action—there’s a special emphasis on women’s rights and women’s health—and a few job-listing sites. And Facebook.</b>&nbsp;A company called Airtel (the local subsidiary of an Indian telco) agreed to offer access for nothing. “I think about it like 911 in the U.S.,” Zuckerberg says. “You don’t have to have a phone plan, but if there’s an emergency, if there’s a fire or you’re getting robbed, you can always call and get access to those kinds of basic services. And I kind of think there should be that for the Internet too.”</i></blockquote><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">Already, these free applications include Western-driven agendas and of course access to Facebook which is now confirmed to be insidiously manipulating user perception.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">Indeed, while "free Internet access" through such apps seems "liberating" and "empowering," Facebook does not let users freely share content. Under the guise of managing cluttered timelines for users, Facebook has already begun involuntarily filtering what posts users will see from accounts they are following, indicating that their manipulative&nbsp;experiments&nbsp;have now become a permanent matter of policy.&nbsp;</span><a href="https://www.facebook.com/business/news/Organic-Reach-on-Facebook" style="background-color: white; color: #888888; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px; text-decoration: none;">Facebook's own explanation</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">&nbsp;of this policy&nbsp;is as follows:</span><br /><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>Rather than showing people all possible content, News Feed is designed to show each person on Facebook the content that’s most relevant to them. Of the 1,500+ stories a person might see whenever they log onto Facebook, News Feed displays approximately 300. To choose which stories to show, News Feed ranks each possible story (from more to less important) by looking at thousands of factors relative to each person.</i></blockquote></div><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">Facebook's "world plan" then, seeks to plug the entire human population into a highly manipulative Skinner box through a bait and switch campaign to lure people online to seek what interests them before Facebook takes over and displays information Facebook itself determines "interests them."&nbsp;</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">Far from a college kid with an overgrown corporation, what Facebook is doing is the manifestation of every tyranny's dream scenario since the beginning of human history - a means by which to completely and insidiously manipulate and control the minds of its subjects.&nbsp;</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">Don't Protest Facebook, Displace It&nbsp;</b><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">To counteract what is clearly the next step in Facebook's unethical and unchecked plague-like spread across the Internet, nations individually&nbsp;</span><a href="http://localorg.blogspot.com/2014/11/dont-replace-facebook-disrupt-it.html" style="background-color: white; color: #6fa8dc; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px; text-decoration: none;">should produce their own alternatives to Facebook</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">&nbsp;and work to get their populations online on their own terms before Facebook and the interests driving it do. Likewise, locally,&nbsp;</span><a href="http://localorg.blogspot.com/2012/12/decentralizing-telecom.html" style="background-color: white; color: #6fa8dc; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px; text-decoration: none;">communities must begin devising their own information networks</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">&nbsp;including mesh networks and local Internets with local and open source alternatives to Facebook, Google, and other corporations exercising the same unwarranted power and influence online that bankers and industrialist exercise over traditional society.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;" /><i style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">Tony Cartalucci, Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine<a href="http://journal-neo.org/" style="color: #6fa8dc; text-decoration: none;">“</a><a href="http://journal-neo.org/" style="color: #6fa8dc; text-decoration: none;">New Eastern Outlook”</a>.</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">&nbsp;</span></div>http://localorg.blogspot.com/2014/12/facebook-colonialism-20.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Land Destroyer)tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7079343630025538378.post-4583860603412314511Wed, 26 Nov 2014 10:32:00 +00002014-11-26T02:32:19.659-08:00businessconceptsWhere's the Money in Free Software?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/O2tvsY3yUqY" width="560"></iframe> <br /><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Free as in freedom, not free as in cost, but part of the deal is that the software code is released, so if there's always the ability to get the source code, where's the money in free software?</i></div></div></div>http://localorg.blogspot.com/2014/11/wheres-money-in-free-software.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Land Destroyer)tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7079343630025538378.post-4059982586647762906Mon, 10 Nov 2014 08:36:00 +00002014-11-10T04:29:10.423-08:00conceptsInfrastructureITDon't Replace Facebook, Disrupt It <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-fgyeDqEiGXc/VGB0Efc_ILI/AAAAAAAAKPo/CMHk0aaL7BA/s1600/SoftCensorship.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-fgyeDqEiGXc/VGB0Efc_ILI/AAAAAAAAKPo/CMHk0aaL7BA/s1600/SoftCensorship.jpg" height="296" width="400" /></a></div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>November 11, 2014</b> (Tony Cartalucci - LocalOrg) - Facebook is a problem. It is undoubtedly being used by special interests to manipulate and monitor entire populations both within the United States and well beyond. It represents a tool that in no way serves the people actually using it, and instead allows special interests to use the users. It is a dream global&nbsp;</span>panopticon for the abusive dictators that run Western society and presume dominion over what they call an "international order."<br /><br />But in order to counter this threat, Facebook cannot simply be "replaced." It specifically, and what it represents, must be disrupted entirely.<br /><br /><b>Facebook is a Skinner Box for Humans&nbsp;</b><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Facebook has been at the center of several recent controversies that are increasingly leaving users disillusioned and in search of alternatives. At the center of these controversies is Facebook's "news feed" feature. Ideally, news feed would work by showing on your timeline updates from those individuals and organizations you follow. There are two options for news feed - "most recent" and "top stories." Facebook has decided to upend this feature by insidiously controlling what appears on your news feed regardless of which option you select.&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Now, you will no longer receive regular updates from accounts you follow, and instead will see a "filtered" version determined by Facebook's algorithms. Many Facebook users are unaware of this fact and are perplexed as to why they are no longer receiving regular updates from accounts they follow.<br /><br /><a href="https://www.facebook.com/business/news/Organic-Reach-on-Facebook" style="background-color: white; color: #33aaff; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">Facebook's own explanation</a><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">&nbsp;as to why they've implemented this policy is as follows:</span></span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i style="background-color: white; line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Rather than showing people all possible content, News Feed is designed to show each person on Facebook the content that’s most relevant to them. Of the 1,500+ stories a person might see whenever they log onto Facebook, News Feed displays approximately 300. To choose which stories to show, News Feed ranks each possible story (from more to less important) by looking at thousands of factors relative to each person.</span></i></blockquote><div style="background-color: white;"><div style="line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">Facebook's real motivation is more likely a combination <a href="http://localorg.blogspot.com/2014/09/facebooks-soft-censorship.html">of implementing soft-censorship</a> and an effort to monetize news feeds by forcing content makers to pay in order to access people already following them. What's left is wealthy content makers like large corporate media outfits monopolizing the public's attention whether the public wants it or not.&nbsp;</div><div style="line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"><br /></div><div style="line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"></div><a name='more'></a><br /><div style="line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">News feed has also been used in at least two involuntary social engineering experiments where the news feeds of users were manipulated without their knowledge to influence them psychologically. In the most recently exposed experiment, <a href="http://rt.com/usa/202019-facebook-user-manipulation-election/">Facebook manipulated the news feed of some 2 million Americans in 2012</a> in order to increase public participation during that year's US presidential election. &nbsp;</div><div style="line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;">In 2013, Facebook would again manipulate news feeds of unwitting users to influence them psychologically.&nbsp;<span style="line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">A report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) titled, "</span><a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full" style="color: #888888; line-height: 21.5599994659424px; text-decoration: none;">Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks</a><span style="line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">," stated in its abstract that:&nbsp;</span></span></div><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">We show, via a massive (N = 689,003) experiment on Facebook, that emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. We provide experimental evidence that emotional contagion occurs without direct interaction between people (exposure to a friend expressing an emotion is sufficient), and in the complete absence of nonverbal cues.Not only are the findings troubling - illustrating that Facebook possesses the ability to influence the emotions of its users unwittingly through careful manipulation of their news feeds - but the invasive, unethical methods by which Facebook conducted the experiment are troubling as well.</span></i></blockquote><div style="line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"><span style="line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">Those involved in the experiment were neither notified before nor after the experiment was conducted, and along with news feed manipulation during the 2012 election, it appears Facebook sees the news feed feature in terms of influencing people as Facebook and its clients see fit rather than the feature being used to inform users as they themselves see fit. &nbsp;</span></div><div style="line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"><span style="line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"><br /></span></div><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-AxPYdOrn86o/VGBz2oGgQHI/AAAAAAAAKPg/1AphlVLbypY/s1600/Skinner_box_scheme_01.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-AxPYdOrn86o/VGBz2oGgQHI/AAAAAAAAKPg/1AphlVLbypY/s1600/Skinner_box_scheme_01.png" height="320" width="316" /></a><span style="line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">What Facebook is essentially is a massive, global, digital "Skinner box." Also known as a operant conditioning chamber, a Skinner box&nbsp;conditions a subject - usually an animal - &nbsp;to perform certain behaviors by controlling positive and negative stimuli regulated within the box. Pressing the correct lever would provide, for example, food pellets, while pressing the wrong lever would provide a painful electric shock.<br /><br />Facebook, in this way, admits it regulated positive and negative stimuli in its 2013 experiment and in 2012 manipulated the behavior of subjects also through the use of specifically formulated stimuli. There is no telling what other experiments or ongoing manipulations Facebook users might be subjected to, and whether or not other IT monopolies like Google are using similar means to influence, manipulate, and condition the behavior of users.&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"><br /></span><span style="line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"><b>Disrupting Facebook</b></span><br /><span style="line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"><br /></span><span style="line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">The first thing many Facebook users look for upon learning of this are alternatives. One in particular, <a href="http://localorg.blogspot.com/2014/09/ello-facebook-killer.html">Ello, grabbed headlines recently as a "Facebook killer</a>." Should Facebook's 1 billion plus user base migrate over to Ello, would there be anything to stop special interests from simply co-opting and corrupting its basic premise of not manipulating users or invading their privacy? Most likely not.<br /><br />Instead, efforts to disrupt Facebook and the centralized social networking premise it represents should be made. In other words, decentralizing social networking so that no single network controls the information, rules, and regulations that define social networking in general.&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"><br /></span><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-53gQXpFTe3c/VGBzjNs9dKI/AAAAAAAAKPY/yHUYw41VtSE/s1600/VK.com-logo.svg.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-53gQXpFTe3c/VGBzjNs9dKI/AAAAAAAAKPY/yHUYw41VtSE/s1600/VK.com-logo.svg.png" height="200" width="200" /></a><span style="line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">On a global scale this is already being done. Nations like Russia, China, Iran, and others have produced their own indigenous versions of Facebook -&nbsp;separate&nbsp;from not only Facebook's monopoly, but the&nbsp;intrusive, abusive exploitation of that monopoly by corporate-financier interests on Wall Street and in the City of London. Russia's <a href="https://vk.com/">VK.com</a> for example, boasts 120 million users around the world and within Russia itself, is the most popular social networking site, by far eclipsing Facebook's market share. While the Western media criticizes VK as a tool of the Kremlin, in light of recent scandals exposed in the West, the same could be said of Wall Street and London's use of Facebook.</span><br /><span style="line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"><br /></span><span style="line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">But decentralizing Facebook's grip on social networking to a national scale isn't enough. While many may find affinity toward the current political order in Russia, some day that may no longer be the case. Further decentralization - in fact - infinite decentralization should be the ultimate goal.</span><br /><br /><b><span style="line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">Forums, Websites, and RSS&nbsp;Analogies&nbsp;</span></b><br /><b><span style="line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"><br /></span></b><span style="line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">Web forums are numerous and in many ways micro social networks in and of themselves. They are built around interests in entertainment, skills and hobbies, commerce, political ideology, religion, and many other personal interests. While one must become a member of these forums to participate, anyone can search the Internet and find threads containing useful information. It would be difficult to find the "Facebook" of Internet forums - because while there are very large and well-known forums - there is no monopoly.<br /><br />Creating a new social networking paradigm based along a similar notion of infinite decentralization is not only possible, it is inevitable - just as soon as programmers and developers stop trying to create the next "Facebook" and begin contemplating instead the next paradigm shift in social networking altogether - one that satisfies the growing desire to escape monopolized networks with proclivities toward invading the privacy of its users as well as manipulating and influencing them through insidious social engineering.&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"><br /></span><span style="line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">Imagine open source tools like Wiki or WordPress that allows anyone to create their own social network based around any specific interest or series of interests. Imagine tools like RSS feed that allows users from one social network to follow user updates on another social network without actually joining that network. Imagine being able to take your information and import it into a new social network if for whatever reason you decided you no longer like the rules, regulations, and practices of the network you were currently in - tools like WordPress' import options that allow Blogger users to migrate over along with all their previous Blogger content.&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"><br /></span><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SAea75TazFI/VGB4zm_RwRI/AAAAAAAAKQA/a0l0SZ3Uypw/s1600/social-media-icons2.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SAea75TazFI/VGB4zm_RwRI/AAAAAAAAKQA/a0l0SZ3Uypw/s1600/social-media-icons2.png" height="378" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: left;"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 13px; text-align: left;"><i><b>Image</b>: What will come next? Another Facebook or something that will shift the paradigm of social networking entirely? Centralized networks are prone to abuse. Even networks like Ello that initially show promise hold the same weakness of over-centralization which will undoubtedly be targeted by special interests. A decentralized social networking paradigm with tools used to mesh networks together as users desire could represent just such a shift. </i></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">Facebook and undoubtedly VK and other large social networks have various groups of disenfranchised users who are unable to use these networks as they truly desire. Facebook has faced criticism for&nbsp;demanding&nbsp;users to use their real names to create profiles. Minority groups that prefer&nbsp;anonymity could create their own social network to cater specifically to their interests and agenda. They could follow popular feeds from other social networks, but preserve their own community created by, for, and of themselves.</span><span style="line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="line-height: 21.5599994659424px;"><br /></span><span style="line-height: 21.5599994659424px;">In this way, instead of simply trying to replace Facebook with the next soon-to-be co-opted, corrupted, and overbearing social networking monopoly, the entire paradigm will be shifted in favor of what users actually want - privacy, the ability to control what content they receive, and to associate with whom they want, how they want. With hundreds if not thousands of these interconnected but&nbsp;ultimately&nbsp;independent networks cropping up, it will be impossible for monopolistic interests to co-opt, control,&nbsp;or censor them all, or even a majority of them. &nbsp;</span></div></div>http://localorg.blogspot.com/2014/11/dont-replace-facebook-disrupt-it.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Land Destroyer)